Hello.
I have an ASUS Model : K95VJ
Bios : American Megatrends Inc. v230 01/24/2013.
Intel HD Graphics 4000 , driver i915
NVIDIA GT 635M , nouveau driver
openSUSE 12.3 (x86_64) (3.7.10-1.16-desktop)
VERSION = 12.3
CODENAME = Dartmouth
Before digging into bumblebee for using optimus functionality, is there a way to blacklist i915 and use only the nvidia card.
Before digging into bumblebee for using optimus functionality, is there a way to blacklist i915 and use only the nvidia card.
Bumblebee 3.0 and up should disable it when not in use. Please read the Bumblebee Project wiki.
You can’t (yet). Mainly because the hardware is designed to not do what you want, i.e. never use the power consuming NVIDIA unless required.
nVidia should have included all of this in their drivers for Linux in the first place.
Can’t you select the card to use directly via the BIOS/UEFI firmware? 
In the bios ASUS I did not have any option for choosing graphic cards.
I am sorry but what do you mean please ?
Is my notebook working under linux as under windows 8, ie when all the graphics power is required; the nvidia card comes into action?
In Windows, the nVidia card gets turned on according to a whitelist of applications that were added to the driver.
Bumblebee allows the user to turn your card on and off.
Nope. On linux it doesn’t work that way.
Default the integrated graphics card is used. So running blender would be executing
/usr/bin/blender
To use the NVIDIA that would have to change to
optirun /usr/bin/blender
or
primusrun /usr/bin/blender
Okay. Scratch my answer.
It would still be nice that the dma buffer interface in the kernel be used to swap off the buffer between cards.
However, due to GPL licensing nVidia has not yet agreed to release the source code.
The next best thing is to use Bumblee.
[quote="“Knurpht,post:10,topic:92885”]
Nope. On linux it doesn’t work that way. [/QUOTE]As a general FYI (i.e. it falls beyond the scope of the prop. nvidia drivers) - Note that gpu runtime power management support has been added with (the forthcoming) kernel 3.12 … for both mux and muxless designs … available for OSS drivers which implement it … nouveau and radeon have both received such support.
So, yes, (thread context not withstanding) this is now be do-able with Linux … though, in the case of optimus based hardware, the experience might be ho-hum, given that the nouveau’s GL performance is (umm, how do you put it eloquently?), currently a “little lacking” 
… on the flip-side of things, powerxpress hardware that uses r600 class gpus (HD2000 through Northern Islands) will, by virtue of the fact that the r600g (i.e. the 3D/GL diver) has become very decent, should now have a favourable experience.
nVidia devs have begun to provide internal documentation about their hardware for the nouveau driver devs to help them update and improve their code.
This was previously unavailable . This is the start of something good.
See: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ2NzYftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/DCB-4.0-Specification.html
yep, looks encouraging!