How to handle my dual graphic device notebook (Intel HD 620 + NVIDIA GTX 960M)?

English Hardware
1

Hi,
i bought a new notebook which has two graphic devices: one Intel HD Graphics 620 (integrated in the CPU i guess) and a NIVIDA GTX 960M.
I have no real problem but some questions. I installed openSUSE tumbleweed in the PC and use GNOME as desktop environment.

  1. I noticed that the gnome system details only list the Intel HD 620 device as graphic device, does this mean that this device is used and not the NIVIDA device?

  2. I also notices that both drivers are installed: the intel driver and the nouveau driver for the NIVIDA card. So what defines which device is used then?

  3. What do i have to do to switch from the Intel device to the NIVIDA device?

  4. What should i do in general which those two devices? At the moment i am pleased with the performance of the Intel device but i am sure that there are situation where i want to switch to the NIVIDA device to get a better performance, is this a realistic scenario or is this switch to complicated practice (maybe because it includes a cumbersome blacklisting of one device and a restart of the system)

  5. Ideally i would like to just hit a button (ore run a script) to switch from one device to the other, without having to restart the system, is this possible?

  6. I am just talking about the nouveau driver at the moment, i know that there is the proprietary NVIDIA driver also, but as i am using tumbleweed i would like to avoid the act of reinstalling the driver after every kernel update.

2

This provides answers to most of your questions: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_Bumblebee

My laptop has a much older NVIDIA, I use bbswitch to turn it off completely. In my case the Intel does a better job than the NVIDIA, both with the nouveau and the proprietary driver.

3

Ok thanks i installed bumblebee, and also the NVIDIA proprietary driver, as described on the page you have posted. But iam not really pleased with the results.
At first i tried the basic benchmark glmark2 without optirun:

glmark2

and i got about 2000 fps on every test.

Then i repeated the test with optirun:

optirun glmark2

and this time i only got about 200 fps on avarage.

Then i tried steam. First of all it did not start at all when just running

steam

it also did not start when running:

optirun steam

it just stucks at:


Running Steam on opensuse 20170707 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1496897923)
libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
[VGL] WARNING: The OpenGL rendering context obtained on X display
[VGL]    :8 is indirect, which may cause performance to suffer.
[VGL]    If :8 is a local X display, then the framebuffer device
[VGL]    permissions may be set incorrectly.

But it runs when starting it via:

primusrun stean

but the wikipage mentioned that one should not use primusrun anymore and only rely on optirun, so that is no option for me.

Then i downloaded some free benchmarks, namely the heaven unigine benchmark found here: https://benchmark.unigine.com/heaven
This runs directly and when called with optirun, and it seems to kind of work, but without optirun i get only about 15fps on avarage and with optirun only about 22 fps on avarage, which is better and allows me to believe that the NIVIDA device was used on the second run but i must say that i had expected more.

Another strange thing is, if i call the nvidia-settings via

optirun nvidia-settings

i get the error message:

You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and restart the X server.

But when i call this (as mentioned in the wiki):

optirun -b none nvidia-settings -c :8

it works, but in the Display Configuration section it lists my monitor as having a virtual size of 640x480.

In the end i am a bit irritated, i am not really sure that this is how the should have worked out.

4

Gave it another try as well, not impressed by the results. Went back to only using bbswitch to put the NVIDIA on “always off”.

There is also an nvidia-prime-alt package. It’s approach is different: it lets you run the entire X session on either the Intel, or the NVIDIA. Tested that in the past too, worked better on my laptop, but the NVIDIA empties the laptop’s battery within an hour. But that is on a relatively old battery.

5

Hello
I am trying the directions of the wiki for Bumblebee.
But there is no command mkinitrd, neither mkinitramfs nor update-initramfs.
So, Bumblebee cannot find module nvidia after installing the driver.
How should i update the kernel img?

6

You do know that this thread is 6 years old???

7

yes, and it’s the only relative to my issue thread. moreover, the wiki mentioned is the only wiki with instructions to install bumblebee, and it is supposed to be updated.
Can you help with the problem regarding the wiki’s instructions?

8

@gerstavros Start a new thread, esp hardware details, Prime Render Offload may be more suitable, mkinitrd has been deprecated…

(Topic Closed)