NVIDIA Optimus On Ubuntu 13.10 Linux vs. Windows 8.1

Long story short, Linux users are still best advised to try to stay away from any Optimus-like laptops/ultrabooks that pair a discrete GPU with an Intel integrated HD Graphics solution. There is no dynamic switching "out of the box" like found on Windows, the NVIDIA binary driver doesn't have any proper support for this solution, when manually switching and using the Nouveau driver the performance is awful, and when using Bumblebee the NVIDIA binary driver can be used but there's very noticeable performance overhead compared to the Windows 8 level of performance. There's also a sharp increase in power consumption. For single GPU systems, the NVIDIA binary driver is usually close to the same speed between Windows and Linux.

There's also the matter of power consumption in these configurations, which will be covered in another Phoronix article along with Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1-devel numbers, etc. There's also many more ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VD-DS72 benchmarks coming from Linux -- this is just the beginning.