Will NVIDIA Optimus Inevitably Come To Linux?

[yogi_berra]

I've never once had a problem with the laptop's I've used linux with (intel wireless)

Consider yourself lucky that you've never experienced wireless disappearing after resume.

[pingufunkybeat]

Yeah, wireless worked perfectly on my laptop before it bit the dust, but I understand that it very much depends on the hardware and the driver.

[elanthis]

Yeah, my laptop has GPU issues but no wireless issues or anything else. (Nouveau randomly locks up on it within minutes of booting, and the official NVIDIA drivers run the GPU too hot the last time I tried; granted, the official NVIDIA drivers on Windows did the same thing and I had to run with a Summer-2010-era vendor-supplied driver until just a month ago. Word for the wise: never ever buy any laptop with ASUS's name attached to it.)

[bwat47]

Which is a neat trick of nVidia's considering the majority of render nodes are headless.

With all of the well known wireless issues involved with Linux, why would you want to use it on a laptop?

I've never once had a problem with the laptop's I've used linux with (intel wireless)

[devius]

So, synergy is a technology that uses the dedicated nvidia gpu for 3D acceleration only, and draws the resulting 3D image to the framebuffer of the main video card, thereby using only one monitor connection and not needing a pass-through cable. Anybody else got a flashback of the PowerVR PCX2?

[bridgman]

did I write "bug render farms"?

I thought you were referring to the fact that a lot of CGI seems to involve giant insects...

[ellolo]

Optimus technology, on the other hand, is for regular consumers, at least in its current incarnation. A low-powered laptop which can add some powerful GPU rendering when needed. You don't do CAD on that. It's great for occasional gamers.

You don't do CAD on this kind of computer: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-l502x/pd.aspx ???!!! What do you need? It can contain a Nvidia GeForce GT540M with 2GB of memory! On such a machine, there isn't problem to work on many CAD models with high-resolution textures.

Definitely, Optimus isn't use only with low-end computers.

I'm guessing that they will not support it unless the FLOSS community makes it easy for them. I'm guessing that nouveau will support this before the blob does.

I hope not because it would also mean no CUDA and Cg since free drivers don't support these technologies.

[crazycheese]

Which is a neat trick of nVidia's considering the majority of render nodes are headless.

With all of the well known wireless issues involved with Linux wireless drivers, why would you want to use it with these wireless drivers on a laptop?

*corrected*

[FireBurn]

Did anyone else find this article painful to read?

[pingufunkybeat]

did I write "bug render farms"?


And you don't need a head to do CUDA or OpenCL.