Low RTF (~0.24) in Isaac Sim 5.1 on RTX 5090

Omniverse Isaac Sim
1

Hi,

I’m seeing very low Real-Time Factor (RTF) when running the Isaac Sim ROS2 Navigation sample with Nova Carter, and I’d like to confirm if this is expected and what the best practices are to improve it. I also want to know what benchmark numbers I should compare against for my specific laptop GPU.

Setup

  • Laptop: Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, 24GB VRAM, 32GB RAM)

  • OS: Ubuntu 22.04

  • Isaac Sim: 5.1.0

  • NVIDIA Driver: 580.95.05

  • ROS2: Humble

  • Display: X11

  • Workload: Isaac Sim “Isaac ROS Navigation / Nova Carter” sample + teleop with teleop_twist (publishing to cmd_vel)

Observations

  • Viewport FPS: ~17 FPS (frame time ~57 ms at 1280×720 viewport)

  • RTF (published via Generic Publisher “Publish RTF as Float32”): ~0.24
    Example message: data: 0.239727184176445

  • RTF topic publish rate: ~16.5 Hz

  • nvidia-smi while Isaac Sim is running:

    • Power: ~71W / 175W cap

    • GPU utilization: ~32–34%

    • VRAM: ~4.6 GB used

So the GPU isn’t heavily utilized, but simulation time progresses at ~0.24× real time, which makes the robot feel laggy/slow in teleop.

What I already tried / confirmed

  • Verified laptop supports Dynamic Boost:

    • /proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/0000:02:00.0/power shows “Notebook Dynamic Boost: Supported”, nvidia-settings -q DynamicBoostSupport returns 1

  • Enabled nvidia-powerd on Ubuntu:

Questions

  1. Is ~0.24 RTF expected for the Nova Carter Isaac ROS Navigation sample on a laptop GPU, even an RTX 5090?

  2. What are the recommended steps to increase RTF for this specific sample (camera render product resolution, camera publish rate, disabling certain publishers, headless mode, DLSS settings, etc.)?

  3. Any known bottlenecks where CPU/ROS2 bridge/publish rate dominates even when GPU utilization is low?

Benchmark question (for RTX 5090 Laptop GPU)

  1. Is there an official or recommended Isaac Sim benchmark suite / script I can run (scene FPS + ROS2 publish throughput) to compare my laptop against expected values?

    • For example: Full Warehouse sample scene FPS, Isaac ROS sample scene FPS, and/or ROS2 “render + publishing speed” KPIs.

    • If you have a recommended command / built-in benchmark entry point for Isaac Sim 5.1 on Linux, I’d love to use that as a reference.

Thanks !

2

Maybe this won’t solve for you, but I had a similar problem with Isaac Manipulator example with Isaac Sim where the FPS dropped when there was a interaction with ROS.

In my case, I just had to turn off Wi-Fi: ROS was trying to broadcast to all networks and the wireless was slowing down the whole execution.

4

Usually we don’t recommend running Isaac Sim on laptop. We have users reporting bad performance on laptop.

Here is system requirements for running Isaac Sim Isaac Sim Requirements — Isaac Sim Documentation

You can try Isaac Sim Compatibility Checker to see if your system meets the minimum requirement Workstation Installation — Isaac Sim Documentation

Here are some Isaac Sim benchmarks that you can try and compare your result Isaac Sim Benchmarks — Isaac Sim Documentation

You might also be interested in checking the performance optimization handbook Isaac Sim Performance Optimization Handbook — Isaac Sim Documentation

5

Hello!

We noticed that this topic hasn’t received any recent updates from anyone reporting this issue, so we are closing it for now to help keep the forum organized.

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The NVIDIA Isaac Sim Forum Team