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alexftw

Member

Registered: 2013-07-03

Posts: 15

Using the VGA port on a hybrid laptop for NVIDIA-only rendering

Greetings,

So, I have a typical laptop with an integrated Intel graphics chip, and a NVIDIA graphics card (GT 630M). Everything runs how it's supposed to run with bumblebee, bbswitch and proprietary drivers, though I'm not entirely satisfied with that.
Most of the time, I use my laptop stationary. It has gotten to the point where I always close the lid, display everything on my external monitor, and use USB keyboard and mouse and such. Because of this I'm fascinated by the idea of being able to render the desktop environment on the NVIDIA card only, and offloading it onto the Intel chip to display that. (muxless system; software offloading)

Though, recently, I have somehow found out (and please prove me wrong if it's not possible) that my laptop has a VGA port directly connected to the NVIDIA card. Thus, my question is: Is it possible to completely bypass the Intel chip and only use the NVIDIA with an external monitor connected through VGA, directly? I don't mean offloading, I mean really directly rendering and displaying everything with the NVIDIA card over VGA.

I'm currently using XFCE4 + compton and an external HD monitor which gives me a minimal environment running okay, but it would be awesome to have a somewhat smoothly running KDE4 setup maybe. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
alexftw

(PS: non-native speaker, so excuse me for any grammatical errors)

Last edited by alexftw (2014-05-23 05:33:39)

cybertorture

Member

Registered: 2010-05-05

Posts: 339

Re: Using the VGA port on a hybrid laptop for NVIDIA-only rendering

Hello,
"Is it possible to completely bypass the Intel chip and only use the NVIDIA with an external monitor connected through VGA, directly"
sorry but answer is "NO" becouse real OPTIMUS is not wired to any output so only intel iGPU have outputs.
Cheers

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O' rly ? Ya rly Oo