Nvidia Optimus
Nvidia Optimus is a technology from Nvidia that aims to save energy in notebooks in order to increase battery life. For this purpose, the more powerful graphics card is automatically switched on to the internal one only when required . The technology is mainly intended for notebooks or other mobile devices.
Optimus is the successor to the so-called “Hybrid Power” technology , in which the user had to switch on the dedicated graphics card manually and put up with about 15 seconds of screen flickering. The prerequisite for using Optimus is an operating system that can handle multiple graphics card drivers, such as Windows 7 . The driver automatically detects whether the application started by the user requires a fast graphics chip and starts it if necessary. The driver evaluates DirectX , DXVA and CUDA function calls and compares them with predefined profiles, similar to the SLI profiles in multi- GPU systems. These profiles are regularly updated by Nvidia via an online update.
If the dedicated graphics card is active, it writes the image information to the memory of the internal graphics card, which is only responsible for outputting the image. This allows you to switch between the two graphics cards without flickering. The PCI-Express bus provides more than enough bandwidth for this. A separate chip on the more powerful graphics card is responsible for this copying process , which is why there should not be any loss of performance.
Nvidia Optimus under Linux based operating systems
Starting with Kernel Version 3.12 there is a Linux driver that supports the Optimus technology. Nvidia started work on a proprietary Linux driver with Optimus support in 2013, the function cannot yet be used, a first beta version is available. However, there is the free software project Bumblebee , which makes it possible to use the dedicated graphics card under Linux for certain applications (e.g. games). The Bumblebee project has not been further developed since 2013; alternatively, with the SUSEPrime software , openSUSE offers the option of changing the graphics processor via a command in the command line, other Linux distributions have their own versions of the software.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ nvidia.de Optimus Accessed on September 19, 2010
- ↑ heise.de/Nvidia-verbessert-Hybrid-Grafik-fuer-Notebooks Retrieved on September 19, 2010
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Hybridgrafik-Unterstuetzung-fuer-Nvidias-Linux-Treiber-1697514.html
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Nvidias-Linux-Treiber-erhaelt-Optimus-Unterstuetzung-1838216.html
- ↑ http://launchpad.net/~bumblebee
- ↑ http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin ( Memento of the original from July 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 26, 2011
- ↑ Announcing Bumblebee 3.2.1 - "Tumbleweed". In: bumblebee-project.org. Retrieved November 6, 2019 .
- ↑ SDS: NVIDIA SUSE Prime - openSUSE Wiki. In: opensuse.org. Retrieved November 6, 2019 .
- ↑ Ubuntu - Information about package nvidia-prime. In: packages.ubuntu.com. Retrieved June 24, 2020 .
