Reverse PRIME Now Works Nicely On Ubuntu 24.10

[Jabberwocky]

Thanks Daniel! Many laptops only support gsync via a single port. It makes sense to have reverse prime for that reason.

I've only had bad experiences with Optimus/Bumblebee/Prime in the past ~14 years but I'm hoping that it changes with my latest attempt this year.

2011 Dell - Sandy Bridge with 560M. The experience was so bad I had to disable the dGPU. Optimus didn't work and Bumblebee was in it's infancy.
2017 Lenovo - Kaby Lake with GTX 1050. Experience was better but battery life was so bad I had to switch to a different system.
2024 Asus - Zen4 with RTX 4070. Hoping this time around it's a good experience in Linux. All Asus zen5 laptops had soldered RAM so far

If this doesn't work out I'm back to System76 / Dell with APU only.

I'm keeping an eye on Asahi Linux as well, it's sad that Apple Silicon is so heavily locked-down. The re-sell value on Apple hardware justifies the extreme prices one pays. Many new laptops cost a fortune and sells for peanuts when you're done with it. I just can't get myself to use their software after kernel lock-downs in macOS 10.15 Catalina.

I finally ended up getting my Asus AMD Ryzen 9 8945H w/ Radeon 780M w/ NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Mobile laptop. I was fortunate enough to get the non-gimped MAX-Q 4070...

Performance is very good. I'm trading blows with Radeon VII / TITAN X Pascal in FP32. Temps go all the way to 78C with spikes to 83C.

It says nvidia-smi reports 95W max but I can get it to jump more than 110W. The laptop performs really well in Windows, it's annoying that the screen goes off every time you launch a program that runs on the Nvidia GPU. Besides the spyware and bloatware that's the only problem that I spotted in Windows 11.

I have many problems with Prime/Optimus in Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. I'm going to have todo some distro hopping and customization.

Even just closing the laptop lid messes up my system performance, this is after installing and updating settings in gnome-tweaks. OLED display burn in must not be a problem for Nvidia users...

Going to try Ubuntu 24.10 as soon as I get time.

Truly sad that 14 years later we still have bad out of the box experience with Nvidia

[Eirikr1848]

They mention Intel and nvidia specifically.

But what about:

- Intel iGPU with AMD or Intel dGPU
- AMD iGPU with nVidia, AMD or Intel dGPU

[Martyn]

We can now finally force browsers (and Electron shovelware) to use the iGPU while still having top performance in video games by connecting to an NVIDIA dGPU direct!

The small wins in life...

[Syfer]

This is great! Except it's Gnome... Does anyone know whether this works on Kubuntu 24.10 as well?

[FireBurn]

I have an AMD Ryzen 5700U laptop which had 512mb allocated to the iGPU, and I was able to change it with UniversalAMDFormBrowser (no controls available in BIOS) .. not sure if you have AMD or Intel, but maybe there's an equivalent tool?

You are a star! VRAM now showing anything up to 16GB and benchmarks work great on the iGPU, I still think there's a bug somewhere as it shouldn't be filling ip the iGPUs VRAM when the dGPU is selected, but now it's not freezing up I'll try and debug some more

Update, what ever issue I was facing, I can't reproduce it now. Battle.net runs on the iGPU and WoW runs on the dGPU - perfect

[sarmad]

Hmmm.... doesn't reverse prime mean that the iGPU is the primary and it sends the picture to a display port hooked to the dGPU?

[QwertyChouskie]

I've been having some issues with regular PRIME lately, basically it's using the iGPU VRAM until it comes full (512mb which I can't change) then slows right down to where the desktop becomes unusable

What processes are using the VRAM? Check the VRAM column in the Processes section of Mission Center.

[Jabberwocky]

Thanks Daniel! Many laptops only support gsync via a single port. It makes sense to have reverse prime for that reason.

I've only had bad experiences with Optimus/Bumblebee/Prime in the past ~14 years but I'm hoping that it changes with my latest attempt this year.

2011 Dell - Sandy Bridge with 560M. The experience was so bad I had to disable the dGPU. Optimus didn't work and Bumblebee was in it's infancy.
2017 Lenovo - Kaby Lake with GTX 1050. Experience was better but battery life was so bad I had to switch to a different system.
2024 Asus - Zen4 with RTX 4070. Hoping this time around it's a good experience in Linux. All Asus zen5 laptops had soldered RAM so far

If this doesn't work out I'm back to System76 / Dell with APU only.

I'm keeping an eye on Asahi Linux as well, it's sad that Apple Silicon is so heavily locked-down. The re-sell value on Apple hardware justifies the extreme prices one pays. Many new laptops cost a fortune and sells for peanuts when you're done with it. I just can't get myself to use their software after kernel lock-downs in macOS 10.15 Catalina.

[bkdwt]

You use case sounds like regular prime, which has worked for years.

I never see this work on my ThinkCentre.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

This is great! Now I can use the UHD 630 to render the desktop etc on Wayland and the A2000 to games or softwares then needs GPGPU.

You use case sounds like regular prime, which has worked for years.