The official proprietary drivers for nvidia and amd gpus tend to work pretty wel...

csense · on Jan 23, 2013

Mobile nvidia cards with nvidia's Optimus technology require two steps to work:

1. Install Bumblebee (requires a PPA) and possibly x-swat PPA as well. [1]

2. Launch video programs through optirun. For example:

  java -Xmx1024m -jar minecraft.jar              # non-Bumblebee users
  optirun java -Xmx1024m -jar minecraft.jar      # Bumblebee users

If you run the first command but have an Optimus card, the program will still run, but it will use the weak Intel GPU instead of the powerful nvidia GPU -- which is plenty powerful enough for "normal" desktop usage like web browsing, email, word processing, or video players, but a recent 3D game will likely turn into a slideshow.

Hopefully the Steam client will make it easy for people to use Bumblebee by giving a GUI to install the PPA and automatically invoking 3D games with optirun.

[1] http://bumblebee-project.org/install.html#Ubuntu

kelvin0 · on Jan 22, 2013

Thank you for that clarification!