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back to article Nvidia coder primes Optimus for Linux

Nvidia's Optimus GPU switching technology may be coming to Linux. Nvidia coder Aaron Plattner and a team of software developers has conjured up a working "proof of concept" that ties Nvidia's technology into the X Window RandR extension, allowing the display image to be selectively rendered on a laptop's Nvidia GPU and on a …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Better late than never!

    Not that it will entice me to buy Optimus technology, mind you. But at least once it works the poor souls who do own such a system will have something better than that Bumblebee monstrosity.

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  2. Turgut Kalfaoglu
    Happy

    Wonderful news!

    This is wonderful news, I hope its support goes mainstream soon!

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  3. J Haupt

    Already available

    There's already the Bumblee Project (http://bumblebee-project.org/) which works splendidly on my Optimus laptop. It's nice to see Nvidia signalling support, but the proof of concept already exists.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Already available

      Bumblebee is a mere workaround which doesn't use the Optimus technology itself, but a dual X11 setup with one server tied to each card. Remember: even if Bumblebee (kinda) works for the end-user it doesn't mean it actually exploits the hardware as it should (in the same vein, software floating-point calculations are not a FPU, and a software 3D rasterizer is not a GPU).

      As such, this NVidia project which integrates directly with XRanR at the driver level is the first actual proof of concept of Optimus technology on Linux.

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  4. Goat Jam
    Linux

    hrrrmph

    What, with this and the imminent release of Steam for Linux could it be the mythical "year of Linux on the desktop" is to become reality?

    Probably not, but it will be good to have more options for the few of us who prefer Linux though.

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