I will be testing Linux on Optimus III

[liamdawe]

So I will be dual booting windows 7 and Linux on my new Optimus III, if anyone is interested I will post up how it goes. It will either be Ubuntu or Mint (64bit on either).

For anyone worried about nvidia optimus under Linux you can use The Bumblebee Project which enables you to use the nvidia card (my current laptop has the same and it works nicely).

 

[liamdawe]

Well if you want to use Linux, don't buy an Optimus III, as currently even The Bumblebee Project does not support the special type of Optimus it uses. So you will like me be stuck using the ivybridge graphics chip.

 

[fnf]

You may consider that fortunate. Way back when Optimus was the new kid on the block, I got an Asus laptop which the integrated Intel and the NVIDIA cards flat out didn't work. I was stuck with vesa until returning it 2 days later.

I'm using a Vortex III 15.4' with the Radeon HD 7970M and am quite content with it: the Intel HD 4000 is enough for my needs as of now, and seeing that ATI hasn't provided a proper driver even for Windows yet, I'm not in a rush to make the ATI card works on Linux.

The Vortex family works extremely well and is very stable, with the following hardware not working (yet):
- The Radeon HD 7970M, both open-source and Catalyst don't support it yet.
- The bass speaker. I failed to make it work even under Windows (did try to set the sound card to work in 5.1 to no avail).

 

[liamdawe]

The reason you would have been stuck is there probably wasn't intel drivers out yet but now there are.

Apparently you have more luck with the open source nvidia driver+bumblebee project with the Optimus III than the binary official driver.

 

[woma]

Hi,

I have received my Optimus III, ten days after ordering, in configuration:

Display 17.3" Glossy Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® CoreTMi5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3320M (2.60GHz) 3MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M - 1.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Hard Disk 750GB SEAGATE MOMENTUS XT HYBRID, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED

The screen is bright, sharp, although as a wide screen I need to move a mouse cursor long way to the corner to reach menu or close the window. It is less convinient than in old 4:3 or 16:10 monitors, which are much better ratios for the laptop screen.

I used Debian Wheezy beta1 net installation CD, although you cannot make installation through WiFi if you don't have binary blobs for wireless card (iwlwifi-6000g2a-5.ucode and iwlwifi-6000g2a-5.ucode) on USB. Alternatively, the firmware comes with firmware-iwlwifi package. I partitioned HD and the installation went smooth. Once the installation was finished, I reboot the laptop and login. Hybrid HD offers a greate value with lots of space and SSD-like speed for its price. Once the laptop was running, it freezed within few minutes, with no other option than hard reset. The stock Wheezy 3.2 kernel is not ready for Ivy Bridge, thus the freezing happened every time shortly after login. The solution was to install 3.4 or 3.5 kernel from experimental repository. The graphics offers sufficient speed to me right now, although I am running only Intel 4000 from Ivy Bridge. I tried different solutions for Nvidia card: nouveau drivier, proprietary nvidia from debian repository and bumblebee way. In all three cases a driver was installed without any problem, the modules were loaded, I edited xorg.conf file, but I have never managed to start X. The system complained about loading 'mouse' module, was unable to access secondary GPU, and sometimes that it cannot reach display ":0". These are known problems, thus as liamdawe mentioned above, Optimus does not work yet in this laptop. There are some successful stories, like https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1147333 , so I hope the solution for debian will come soon. If anybody does know one (and the 'debian way'), please post it in the forum.

 

[woma]

Just to add to my former post, even if secondary GPU doesn't work with bumblebee (not yet), it is worth to install it with nvidia drivers (bumblebee-nvidia debian package). I installed nvidia driver from sid - over my wheezy release, and it turns on ACPI on 650M chip, thus the laptop use less energy and is colder comparing to the situation before driver installation. It is just my subjective feeling when I keep my hands on the keyboard, but the difference is obvious to me.

Update.
Here is prescription how to make Optimus 650M working:
http://eternalvoid.net/tutorials/linux-optimus-gt650m/
I did failed to compile nvidia kernel module, although It seems to work for many people. I am still waiting for the 'debian way' through package manager.

2nd Update
I am running now kernel 3.5 from debian experimental repositories. After reinstalling today (1st Sept) bumblebee from http://suwako.nomanga.net sid/main and nvidia drivers for bumblebee-nvidia from sid (I am still on wheezy as a main system) debian repositories, finaly Optimus is working. However, in processor sensitive benchmarks nvidia 650m with optirun is slower than IvyBridge from intel, but in graphics sensitive (glx... tests) 650m is faster. Thus, for example:

1. Test from HardInfo:
CPU Blowfish
optirun makes 4.4 sec, IvyBridge only makes 3.7 sec (lower is better)
CPU CryptoHash
optirun makes 346 MiB, without optirun makes 430 MiB (higher is better)

2. Imagej, plasma plugin:
optirun makes 3000 fps, without optirun makes 3600 fps (higher is better)

3. GtkPerf test:

optirun makes (in seconds):
GtkEntry - time: 0.05
GtkComboBox - time: 0.85
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.79
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.09
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.06
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.09
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.04
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.05
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.13
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.00
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 2.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.68
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.51
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.11
---
Total time: 5.73

without optirun makes (in seconds):
GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 0.33
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.24
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.05
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.07
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.04
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.05
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.11
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.00
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 1.98
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.56
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.39
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.10
---
Total time: 4.02

4. glxspheres
optirun makes 67.528478 frames/sec - 75.361781 Mpixels/sec
without optirun makes 59.812007 frames/sec - 66.750199 Mpixels/sec

5. glxgears
optirun makes 3148 frames in 5.0 seconds = 629.520 FPS
without optirun makes 300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.826 FPS

It looks like in current configuration, optirun way of running programs is too much processor intensive, which slows down system significantly. Hopefully, native Optimus technology in Nvidia drivers, without bumblebee will give better performance (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE3MzY)

Cheers