Optimus can be used without bumblebee. Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki can help.

In many cases yes. But I believe it's not the case for the W550s. I messed around a long while trying to get the NVIDIA driver to work on its own with no success. Then I came across something that led me to believe what I posted above. I can't find it at the moment, but I'm quite sure that's what I learned.

Dave

So if I read this right, with bumblebee you pick and choose which programs will use the technology and which ones don't. Also, I noticed that the most recent version of bumblebee is 2013. It still works with current drivers?

The issue I'm facing is some sluggishness in the desktop. For example, rendering on firefox is slow as is scrolling a page.

Is it possible that the nouveau driver is getting in the way? I believe there is an extra package to help with blacklisting that. Is it possible that if nouveau is silenced that performance will improve?

I totally missed that this was an Optimus setup. xflow7 is correct in that you will likely need to set up bumblebee to get it to work properly. However, there is a slight chance you are able to set a specific card as the primary card in the BIOS.

To get an Optimus setup to work, have a look at the Slackware docs page on bumblebee.

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har...nvidia_optimus

That's right. Although I think in principle you can use primusrun (the 'run this on NVIDIA' command) to launch the Xserver so that everything is run through the NVIDIA card.

It seems to work here. I used the scripts/versions/instructions from here: https://github.com/WhiteWolf1776/Bumblebee-SlackBuilds. These seem to work fine. The one issue I've had (which I haven't tried to confirm on the latest stack) is that anything running with bumblebee fails to come back from suspend properly. That hasn't been a big deal as I've mainly used bumblebee for some Steam games that don't render correctly using the Intel driver. But if that issue still comes up, it might be a big impact for running e.g. firefox under it.

What DE are you using? I haven't had any issues with KDE using the intel driver, but in XFCE scrolling in firefox and other things is quite slow. I think I recall from a year or two ago (on a different computer) there being a setting in XFCE that helped alot, but I don't recall what it was. If you're using XFCE, I would suggest first trying another WM/DE and see if you find the same problem.

I doubt it, but it's worth trying if nothing else works. Honestly, the Intel GPU on these machines is actually quite good. I get better performance in glxgears (FPS-wise) using the intel driver than running through NVIDIA using bumblebee. The main benefit of the NVIDIA card is certified drivers for 3D engineering applications.

Try a different DE/WM if you haven't already before going through the trouble of getting Optimus up and running.

Dave

Yeah, unfortunately there's no such option in the W550s BIOS which is the trouble.

Dave

Dumb question. How would I start Xserver under bumblebee? I guess that if programs running under bumblebee don't return from suspend, that would also be the case if I started X running through NVIDIA?


I'm running KDE.


I thought blacklisting nouveau would probably not matter, although if I go with the proprietary driver, I should probably blacklist nouveau since I have read that the two don't play well together.

Thanks for your advice so far. It's all been very helpful.

Not a dumb question; I'm not sure myself, but I think I have read of people doing that. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suggest trying if coming from runlevel 3, or editing /etc/rc.d/rc.4 to add primusrun before the call to kdm if coming from runlevel 4.

but I've never tried this.

That would be my assumption, too. But again, I've not actually tried this.

Yeah, you will have to do that when you use the NVIDIA driver (the NVIDIA kernel module won't load otherwise). The bumblebee setup process linked above has a step to blacklist nouveau as I recall.

No problem. It's nice to feel like a source on a forum where I usually feel like a sink.

Dave

By the way, one other thing you might try is to force X to use SNA acceleration rather than UXA acceleration. I happened to be reminded about this from another post earlier today. I just tried it and it seems to have sorted out the slow scrolling I was seeing in XFCE.

Create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf with:

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Wow! That made a HUGE difference. I love a simple solution. Thanks!

the nvidia drivers work really good real recent upgrade more than amd for now.


only downside is not getting hdmi sound without X

And I will be trying to uninstall the drivers but maybe just try to reinstall / just to be safe.

All in all positive experience . It seems even easier on arch linux very snap installation they have. But I like the native client install there is a feel to using it.

When you uninstall use the nvidia-switch script to reset Mesa back as the OpenGL drivers or you might get errors.

I think you can use the HDMI audio via ALSA's driver stack but it requires extensive setup in asound.conf or Pulse's control panel.