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O.K. There is a mountain of information out there that I can find of particular help is this thread: How well do laptops with Nvidia Optimus work?

The hardware I'm trying to install on is an Alienware m11x r2 (slightly old running an GT335M as its discrete GPU with an i3 processor).

But I'm a little confused and have a couple of questions:

  1. Should I use bumblebee if I'm installing 12.10 or will the noveau driver be sufficient?
  2. How do I verify (other than warming my coffee on the GPU) that the optimus stuff is working?
  3. Can I use CUDA with nouveau drivers?
  4. Why are graphics drivers for linux such a difficulty. (The AMD desktop drivers)

The last question was rhetorical.

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Michael
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1 Answers1

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  1. I believe both options are fine. The former will use the binary drivers, which have better performance but are not open source.

  2. Check this page to see how to test if the aquarium WebGL page gives you better performance: https://launchpad.net/~hybrid-graphics-linux

  3. Yes. CUDA and Optimus are independent. If your card has CUDA cores and you have the CUDA libraries installed, you should be able to use them when the card is switched on regardless of the drivers you use.

  4. NVIDIA provides binary drivers but they don't spend as many resources on them as they do on their bigger markets: Microsoft, Android and OSX. The bigger the market, the better the support.

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