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I have a laptop with i7 (Intel HD4600 integrated GPU) and nVIDIA 860M (dedicated GPU).
In UEFI I am able to disable nVIDIA's GPU but Intel's one.
Instead keeping both active, I always keep nVIDIA disabled and I enable it (in UEFI) only for gaming, this allow better temperatures, battery length and power drain.
I do NOT want switching with Optimus/Bumblebee!
I have searched but did not understand how to do what I want: staying with the only Intel all the time except when I am at a LANParty.
How do I configure archlinux to manage 2 different GPUs? Did not find anything.
I do not know:
1) which driver to install
2) which modules to load
3) how to configure xorg.conf
4) what to choose between mesa-libgl and nvidia-libgl
Last edited by buntolo (2015-01-25 11:47:07)
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I'm thinking that might not be possible without Optimus/Bumblebee, but I'm far from a guru on the topic.
But out of curiosity, do you see any noticeable difference in battery life between disabling the discrete card in UEFI vs. software?
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I'm thinking that might not be possible without Optimus/Bumblebee, but I'm far from a guru on the topic.
But out of curiosity, do you see any noticeable difference in battery life between disabling the discrete card in UEFI vs. software?
I have this laptop since last week so I have never had any chance to run a battery test yet.
But I have managed to do CPU and GPU stress tests: with GPU disabled in UEFI I gain 3/5°C during CPU stress test and 1/3 °C at idle. Temperatures aren't fixed, they waver by 1/2 °C, that's why it changes from 1°C (minimum difference at idle) to 5°C (maximum difference under load). I think the reason behind these temperatures differences is that an enabled GPU can't stay at 0W and thus at 0MHz clock, infact I can see from GPU analyzing tools that it's clocked above 0 even if it's not being used.
Someone could argue that a mean of 3°C is nothing to be worried about, but I care about it because temperatures are above 40°C at idle and around 90/95°C at full load; today I have 30°C outside house and 25°C inside, but summer here can be worse with 38°C outside and 29°C inside.
Max temperature before protection-power cut out is (usually) 100°C for CPUs and 100/105°C for GPUs, so you can see why it matters for me.
Not to mention that electronic component life get shorter at higher temperatures (for example a capacitor lose around 33% of life if it works at 10°C more).
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Check out the Bumblebee page on the wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/bumblebee
I use bumblebee with bbswitch to automatically disable my NVidia card.
To be able to turn on the NVidia card you will need either NVidia drivers or nouveau installed. Then it looks like you either run optirun or primusrun followed by the application that you want to run utilizing the NVidia card. My understanding is that it will turn on the card only for the duration of the program. Note: I have never used the NVidia card on my system, I just leave it disabled all the time.
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I've solved by keeping the nVIDIA always disabled and enabling it when it's time to play. Then I just launch game/steam/whatever using 'primusrun $software'.
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