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iamkarlson

Member

Registered: 2023-01-17

Posts: 28

Force NVIDIA on Optimus with Wayland

Wiki describes how to force using NVIDIA graphics only on Xorg but Wayland section is missing. However, sway FAQ suggest to force wlroots to start on a different card like so:

WLR_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card1 sway

Regretfully, I'm getting black screen with blinking cursor.

Is there any way to use NVIDIA only on Optimus systems?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,255

Re: Force NVIDIA on Optimus with Wayland

Unless you have a physical switch/a UEFI/BIOS option to disable the integrated card, not really. There's no concept of "NVIDIA only" on a real optimus system. All you can do is make the integrated card a dumb pipe for the nvidia card to render into. This wasn't really trivial on Xorg and would probably need a lot of work on the compositors side to implement properly (there's also no Wayland like there's a Xorg. Wayland might define a protocol (afaik this hasn't happened) and compositors need to decide whether they implement said protocol (... or have a custom solution) which afaik also hasn't happened in any general capacity.

FWIW reading the docs suggests this should be possible if you list all your cards in the correct order: e.g.

WLR_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card1:/dev/dri/card0 sway

first card in that list will be the renderer and the second the presenter

Last edited by V1del (2023-02-14 09:05:17)