Arch Linux

ppb

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 11

Switching between GPUs with nvidia 435 driver

Yesterday I installed nvidia driver 435.21 as I read that it finally allows for easy GPU switching.
When I installed Arch some three years ago, I set nvidia to discrete in BIOS, so it was used as my main GPU all this time.
Yesterday after installing 435.21, I switched to MSHYBRID and the system booted fine, whereas previously it wouldn't work, so that's progress.
However where do I go from here to actually start using Intel GPU as my main driver and only switch to nvidia for stuff like games and rendering?
lspci shows both gpus are in use:

$ lspci -vnnn | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 [8086:191b] (rev 06) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GP106BM [GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile 6GB] [10de:1c60] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

however glxinfo shows nvidia as the main driver:

$ glxinfo|egrep "OpenGL vendor|OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GTX 1060/PCIe/SSE2

I have no idea where to even start searching for what to do now, because, as I understand, optimus/bumblebee is no longer the way to go with this newest driver? Any hints are welcome. :-)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,415

Re: Switching between GPUs with nvidia 435 driver

You need to at least install a patched xorg, see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=248796 for some more information. You also should be weary that low power states has not yet been implemented for pre-Turing GPUs so you would likely go higher in terms of power consumption while not using the nvidia adapter than you would with bbswitch/bumblebee.

ppb

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 11

Re: Switching between GPUs with nvidia 435 driver

Thank you for the pointer. :-)