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Remember we recently wrote about the MATE Optimus GPU switcher being developed by Martin Wimpress of Canonical? Well, it just keeps getting better.

The fun feature added in the previous update was support for on-demand switching, which was added in a recent NVIDIA driver update. Wimpress hasn't stopped though, with two more releases being put out since our little news tip.

Most recently in the 19.10.3 release the session logout feature needed when fully switching GPUs gained support for GNOME, KDE and LXQt in addition to the already supported MATE, XFCE, Budgie and Cinnamon Linux desktops making it even more useful. Wimpress also added "offload-glx" and "offload-vulkan" launchers, to make it easier to offload games and applications to the NVIDIA Prime Renderer.

You can also have it auto-start on any desktop environment and another helper is that all UI strings can now be translated too.

See it on GitHub. Fantastic stuff, if I had an NVIDIA Optimus laptop this would be incredibly useful.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

Spyker Sep 11, 2019
Hopefuly this will be picked up by others distros as well.


Last edited by Spyker on 11 September 2019 at 11:20 am UTC
edo Sep 11, 2019
Im waiting for it to arrive to the AUR


Last edited by edo on 11 September 2019 at 3:20 pm UTC
Purple Library Guy Sep 11, 2019
Wimpressive!
Sil_el_mot Sep 11, 2019
uh. i feel a bit dumb. for what is this.. nvidia on demand.. my gpu is barely getting hot when i am not playing any games, so for what do i need this piece of software?
rustybroomhandle Sep 11, 2019
Quoting: Sil_el_motuh. i feel a bit dumb. for what is this.. nvidia on demand.. my gpu is barely getting hot when i am not playing any games, so for what do i need this piece of software?

For laptops who have both a low power Intel GPU and a high power Nvidia GPU. The tool lets you switch between the two on the fly. Or also (I assume) to launch certain programs using the NV, while your desktop carries on with the Intel.
Sil_el_mot Sep 11, 2019
Quoting: rustybroomhandle
Quoting: Sil_el_motuh. i feel a bit dumb. for what is this.. nvidia on demand.. my gpu is barely getting hot when i am not playing any games, so for what do i need this piece of software?

For laptops who have both a low power Intel GPU and a high power Nvidia GPU. The tool lets you switch between the two on the fly. Or also (I assume) to launch certain programs using the NV, while your desktop carries on with the Intel.

Thanks. that makes sense to me.
hagabaka Sep 12, 2019
Quoting: edoIm waiting for it to arrive to the AUR
I tried for a little bit, but it seems to be very distro-specific. It expects scripts like "prime-supported", "prime-select", "prime-switch", and "nvidia-detector" to exist, and none of those are included with NVIDIA drivers or mentioned in ArchLinux wiki pages, but they are in Ubuntu/Mate/Linux Mint packages.


Last edited by hagabaka on 12 September 2019 at 5:03 am UTC
Tim Sep 12, 2019
Quoting: SpykerHopefuly this will be picked up by others distros as well.
It's already waiting for you in your distro. ;)
michaldybczak Sep 14, 2019
Since this won't work on Arch systems, I posted the idea to the optimus-manager developer so maybe he will implement something similar there?
mcwalter Dec 18, 2019
Does anyone know if this works with amd graphics to nvidia?
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