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mysterious

Member

Registered: 2012-12-11

Posts: 3

How to disable Intel card (only use NVIDIA) ?

Hi everyone!

My laptop uses a hybrid card and I want to disable Intel card and use NVIDIA card only. Is it possible? I have tried bumblebee, bbswitch but it doesn't seem to work; still cannot load NVIDIA card at startup and NVIDIA card is always OFF (but "optirun glxspheres" works well).
        # cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch 
        0000:01:00.0 OFF

Thank you!

johni

Member

Registered: 2012-02-03

Posts: 102

Re: How to disable Intel card (only use NVIDIA) ?

That really depends on your laptop.   Some optimus laptops have a hardware mux that allows the nvidia card direct access to the display.  If your has one it may be possible.  Other laptops don't give the nvidia card access to the display, in which case bumblebee will be your only choice until Nvidia creates an optimus driver for Linux.

Look in the laptop's BIOS settings to see if it offers an option to disable the intel card.  There are some laptops that have the hardware mux, but no option in the bios to switch it.  In some of these cases you can flash a modified BIOS that adds the option.

What brand and model is your laptop?

mysterious

Member

Registered: 2012-12-11

Posts: 3

Re: How to disable Intel card (only use NVIDIA) ?

My laptop's bios doesn't have the option to disable optimus. I'm using a Asus U46SV.
thanks!

Arogers10

Member

Registered: 2012-06-20

Posts: 68

Re: How to disable Intel card (only use NVIDIA) ?

I also have an Optimus/hybrid laptop and the only solution really is bumblebee. I generally have no issue using the intel chip for daily tasks and for the games and programs i've been using bumblebee with primus. I would recommend installing primus-git from AUR and running programs that need Nvidia graphics with "primusrun ...". Also there is no way to have bumblebee to enable just the Nvidia card for the entire session, you really do just have to pick and choose what programs will use it. for example I start the dolphin gamecube emulator with "primusrun dolphin-emu" and it works just fine. I use gnome so via alacarte I edited my application menu icons/shortcut for games and google-earth so that they start up with primus automatically. Of course it's not ideal but it gets the job done. Also, from what I've read, the intel chip graphics are supposed to be speedier and snappier for most things while the nvidia chip is more ideal for heavy graphics rendering.

johni

Member

Registered: 2012-02-03

Posts: 102

Re: How to disable Intel card (only use NVIDIA) ?

My laptop's bios doesn't have the option to disable optimus. I'm using a Asus U46SV.
thanks!

I found this on the ubuntu forums.  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1842294
You might see if you have this non-obvious bios option:

On some Asus laptops, enter the BIOS by pressing F2 when the ASUS logo appears, go to “Advanced”, select "Boot VGA Controller Selection" and change it from "Windows 7" to "Others". Boot into Ubuntu where it will ask you to enable the Nvidia driver. After it installs the driver, reboot once more and test the 3d graphics performance.

mysterious

Member

Registered: 2012-12-11

Posts: 3

Re: How to disable Intel card (only use NVIDIA) ?

I have checked my bios again and no "Boot VGA Controller Selection" option. I will try http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1842294 and Arogers10's suggest. I'm using Backtrack 5 R3 KDE x64 but when I run "optirun glxspheres", i get poor performance (around 12-15 FPS with GT540M and "glxspheres" failed, strange). Perhaps I should get the latest Ubuntu 12.10.