Arch Linux

Misopeth

Member

Registered: 2018-12-31

Posts: 5

Clarification about hybrid graphics and hardware video acceleration

I have a laptop with a hybrid graphics card (integrated Intel graphics + dedicated Nvidia). I was able to make the cards work with bumblebee, but now I'm confused regarding the hardware video acceleration.

I was able to make the hardware acceleration work only with the Intel graphics card, by setting the environment variables

VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD

and installing the relevant packages (intel-media-driver and libvdpau-va-gl). I tried doing the same for the Nvidia card but it didn't work. For that I set

VDPAU_DRIVER=nvidia
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=vdpau

with the packages nvidia-utils and libva-vdpau-driver installed.

Does bumblebee also come into play regarding hardware video acceleration? What I understood is that I should make HW video acceleration work as shown above while applications using the GPU in another way (Image/video editing, scientific computing using CUDA) should be run using optirun. Is this correct?