Posted on Wednesday, April 10 2013 @ 14:19 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Phoronix
reports NVIDIA's Optimus technology is finally available for Linux. The feature has been added in the GeForce 319.12 Beta driver for Linux, which was released yesterday morning.
NVIDIA OPTIMUS! While not blatantly obvious from the published change-log, one of the items notes, "Added initial support for RandR 1.4 Provider objects with the Source Output capability, which can be used to render the desktop on an NVIDIA GPU and display it on an output connected to a provider with the Sink Output capability, such as an Intel integrated graphics device or a DisplayLink USB-to-VGA adapter. See the README for details." With RandR 1.4 it allows NVIDIA to now render a game or other application on a dedicated NVIDIA GPU and to then pass the scan-out buffer to another GPU for displaying to the screen, such as an integrated Intel graphics processor or a USB-based DisplayLink adapter.
NVIDIA Optimus has been a much sought after feature by NVIDIA Linux users with many laptops today now shipping with the hybrid Intel-NVIDIA GPU design. NVIDIA confirmed last year it was working on Optimus Linux support and they were working on some PRIME helper patches to workaround being blocked from using DMA-BUF. This came after last year, Linus Torvalds was harshly criticizing NVIDIA and called them the worst company ever among other harsh words and gestures.
