Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

Modeler · 2014-09-01 07:21:09

I have a Lenovo Z50 with hybrid Intel / NVIDIA graphics, using the proprietary NVIDIA driver from extra and bumblebee. The actual hardware is:

Intel HD Graphics 4400
NVIDIA GeForce 820M

The switching part seems to work fine, but the NVIDIA performance is dreadful. Had some disappointing results when running GPU-intensive apps; the Intel GPU producing visibly better results – hardly the point right? glmark2 was returning a score of roughly one tenth of that of the Intel GPU when launched with optirun. It wouldn't work at all with primusrun.

I would be interested to hear other people's experience with this sort of laptop; I can't help feeling that we're losing out because I've seen many a stand-alone NVIDIA card (i.e. its own frame buffer) working beautifully under Linux in the past. Why couldn't Intel and NVIDIA sort it out between them as they did for Windows? As if I don't know the answer already...

brebs · 2014-09-01 08:29:13

Yes, bumblebee does work, in general at least. It's certainly a pain to set up.

It would be best to check your logfiles (e.g. dmesg, /var/log/Xorg.0.log) for anything suspicious, and post your /etc/bumblebee/* files, so we can check them.

dice · 2014-09-01 10:16:54

I use bumblebee for quite a while now. it sometimes needs to be kicked in its ass to make it run but when it runs it works good with nvidia drivers.

Regarding glmark2 score, I think the score is just wrong
I get lower score when using optirun instead of integrated intel too.
When playing any game (e.g. supertuxkart) using optirun gives A LOT better performance than integrated intel graphics. Therefore I just don't trust glmark2 in this case.

Modeler · 2014-09-02 10:05:37

Thank you both, that gives me a bit more confidence. I'll try supertuxkart and see if I still have an issue.

Thaodan · 2014-09-06 23:58:36

brebs wrote:

Yes, bumblebee does work, in general at least. It's certainly a pain to set up.
It would be best to check your logfiles (e.g. dmesg, /var/log/Xorg.0.log) for anything suspicious, and post your /etc/bumblebee/* files, so we can check them.

Never had an issue , what do you mean?

PS: you should use bumblebee with primus its mutch faster

faiz · 2014-09-08 02:46:39

Yep, it certainly does, although I haven't determined the performance differences yet. Certainly it runs glxspheres much better than my integrated unit (using primusrun) and of course you have to fiddle with all the libraries to work correctly together

Aside from all that manual labor, its pretty awesome in terms of power efficiency.

Modeler · 2014-09-08 10:16:31

faiz wrote:

Certainly it runs glxspheres much better than my integrated unit (using primusrun) and of course you have to fiddle with all the libraries to work correctly together

I followed the steps here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/bumblebee

Got bumblebee running with the NVIDIA drivers without any headaches as such, but pacman seemed to do the legwork. There wasn't any fiddling with libraries to speak of, could you elaborate on this at all please?

Thanks.

faiz · 2014-09-08 15:26:47

Hey Modeler,

You really only need to fiddle if you're having issues. For ex, with Steam I needed to use the opensource mesa 32bit libs to get their platform to run correctly.

I ended up pairing nvidia's closed-source driver with lib32-mesa-libgl and found that work pretty well with Steam (32-bit app?), where other games like Xonotic worked out of the box. Mainly, I think you should be prepared to install 32-bit libraries as relevant, but otherwise (as long as you're booting X with your intel driver) everything is pretty well explained on that wiki.

If you're having problems with a specific platform, I think you could post the errors here and we could debug, if that helps

Arch Linux

#1 2014-09-01 07:21:09

Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#2 2014-09-01 08:29:13

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#3 2014-09-01 10:16:54

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#4 2014-09-02 10:05:37

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#5 2014-09-06 23:58:36

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#6 2014-09-08 02:46:39

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#7 2014-09-08 10:16:31

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

#8 2014-09-08 15:26:47

Re: Does Optimus actually work on Linux?

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