On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
Dne St 30. října 2013 12:26:18, Basil Chupin napsal(a):
On 30/10/13 12:07, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
Dne St 30. října 2013 11:11:20, Basil Chupin napsal(a):
What hidden reefs am I going to strike if I buy a laptop, to install openSUSE (13.1- and beyond), which has for its graphics something called 'NVIDIA NVS 5400M Graphics with Optimus Technology'?
snip
Yes, there are two cards. Optimus technology is here to be able to switch between two graphic cards: one onboard (usually Intel, not strong, but power saving) and second (NVIDIA or ATI with high performance and higher energy consumption) very powerful. So You can choose in You need to save energy (laptop running from battery) or You need high performance (playing games or whatever). You can use kernel modules for Intel and blacklist those for NVIDIA or vice versa, so You use only the respective graphical card. It usually works fine. Bumblebee is here to give You possibility to switch graphic cards in running Linux system.
Worst case is, you will be able to use the laptop with the Intel video and all will "just work". You really only need the NVidia side if you're planning on gaming or doing some high end graphics rendering. As Vojtěch said, you can tinker with Bumblebee and get it working such that you can launch specific apps to run on the NVidia side. For general use, it's rarely worth the extra effort and pain - especially on a laptop (depending of course on what you intend on using the laptop for). I've got one machine with Optimus and never bothered with Bumblebee... the Intel side provides 100% of what is needed for a work laptop (office document editing, internet browsing, email etc.) C. -- openSUSE 12.3 x86_64, KDE 4.11 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org