[Nottingham] nvidia optimus - any OS

[Mike Cardwell]

* on the Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 09:37:30AM +0000, Jason Irwin wrote:

> Anyone any experience of using this on any OS?
> 
> At the moment I have to force the use of nvidia in the BIOS as optimus
> switching does not seem to work (which can't be right).
> When I do force the nvidia card, performance is about 1/10th of the
> Intel one (Sauerbraten runs at ~20fps rather than 200fps). Which also
> can't be right.
> This poor performance is consistent between Windows and Kubuntu
> (Bumblebee is installed and working).
> I updated to the latest drivers in Windows - no change, although the GUI
> definitely has all the knobs and buttons for optimus.
> 
> So...err...I kinda need to figure out what I'm doing wrong or if this
> lappy has a fault.

If you're running the latest Windows drivers and it's slower when using
the Nvidia GPU, the card sounds broken to me. Unless Sauerbraten sees
the faster GPU and so automatically tunes the game graphics settings for
a higher performance card, but tunes them too high? Not sure if this
is something it does?

Are you running the Nouveau drivers under Linux, or the proprietary
ones? I've heard the proprietary ones perform much better...

FWIW, as of 3.12, Linux now has built in GPU switching support:
http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

"1.3. Automatic GPU switching in laptops with dual GPUs

Some laptop hardware, like Nvidia Optimus, have two GPUs, one optimized
for performance and other for power saving. Until now, some hacks have
been needed to switch between these GPUs. In this release, the driver
handles the switch automatically"

I'm running Debian Testing on several machines and it has been stable
for me. It's currently on 3.11 but I'd expect it to update to 3.12
soon.

-- 
Mike Cardwell  https://grepular.com/     http://cardwellit.com/
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