Nvidia Optimus Support

[Madrang]

Sad to see that i still can't play on my laptop. Nvidia needs to release a driver.

$ steam
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display

Temporary fix for Nvidia Optimus Users!
http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/882965239596360434/

[enleeten]

I concur. You can't really buy an nvidia laptop these days without optimus. Please convince Nvidia to support the hardware they sell.

[Phase]

Nvidia is actually working on it (from what i've seen anyway), will be some time due to licence problems. you can try bumblebee as a stopgap until the driver suports it (Not trivial to install, not it the beta so i can't test it)

[enleeten]

I've used bumblebee but it seemed to cause a lot of system freezes and hard to debug issues.

[D4rk4ng3L]

I've found bumblebee/optirun combo to be quite effective so far. Could do with a bit more publicity maybe. I just followed a step-by-step guide. The messy bit was putting the latest Nvidia drivers in. I think something similar to the windows context menu add-on, which let's you right-click launch with one's selected GPU, would be a nice feature for the nubbins like me :P

[Topperfalkon]

Bumblebee worked fine for me, I had to use it to get the HIB games running on my laptop. The Steam Client works on my laptop which, given I'm not even in the beta, I'm pretty pleased about.

[Dusk of Oolacile]

I'm almost sure that nvidia laptops are the same as AMD laptops. Driver support is provided by the manufacturer, because they don't allow AMD/nvidia to do it. So go to Asus/Toshiba/HP/etc., contact their support, and ask for working drivers. The more you do it, the more like they will be to provide one.

[cybik]

Bumblebee works fine for me too. Gentoo system here.

[Letalis Sonus]

Just some remarks on the technical situation of Optimus:
Nowadays all Optimus laptops are build without a multiplexer (MUX-less), that means the Nvidia GPU has no physical connection whatsoever to the laptop screen. The driver has to cooperate with the driver of the Intel GPU, as the Intel GPU is the only one that can put *anything* on the display.

Bumblebee is actually just starting a second X Server using an OpenGL wrapper library and uses your primary X Server for displaying its stuff. This is very inefficient. The most efficient way of realizing this cooperation is to create a buffer sharing mechanism right on driver/kernel level. However, there are some serious legal barriers as this mechanism is rather invasive - and I don't see this clearing up in the near future, Wayland will probably put everything into chaos first with its requirements for KMS and EGL.

As far as I can tell most AMD based hybrid systems (as well as a few of the first Optimus ones) actually still have a multiplexer. It makes things rather simple and efficient, you just need to support the multiplexer to tell it what GPU to use and AMD actually has some kind of support for it in their proprietary driver (using some dirty script voodoo to switch between OpenGL libs etc when combined with a Intel GPU). The only drawback is that each switch requires a restart of the X Server as it is not (yet?) able to switch GPUs on-the-fly.