aplattner: aplattner: Sorry I haven’t been able to reply earlier. I mostly asked for this thread to keep render offload discussion out of the thread about display offload so people trying to get display offload to work could use that thread. Render offload is quite complicated, so I don’t want to set any false expectations. It’s something we’re looking into, but I can’t promise anything or comment on it beyond that.

I came to this thread only after reading the one regarding display offload.

Don’t get me wrong, we really, really appreciate the efforts put in to the drivers for us. But we’re not okay with being un-equal or second-class to Windows in implementation support. Perhaps Windows makes off-loading easier? I don’t know, I don’t pretend to. But I do know that the Linux situation isn’t acceptable.

Let me attempt to describe the absurdity of this situation to you; I just spent 2.5 days tiddling with a few distros and their implementations (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Manjaro, Sabayon).

Ubuntu - Using their own solution which is made up of a few python scripts, a binary program (for gfx detection), some variables in various files in /etc/, and it’s a log in/out situation. Basically we’d call it Ubuntu-PRIME. You need to log out then in if you switch between Intel/Nvidia. No vsync using Nvidia (since fixed in git, thanks guys!). No power off for powersaving. Bumblebee breaks Ubuntu-PRIME. No easy offloading or dynamic switching.

openSUSE -A somewhat hostile to proprietary drivers distro. DKMS isn’t standard and they don’t see a need for it (Grrr). There are a few hacked together solutions; bumblebee through 3rd party repo, an Ubuntu-PRIME like solution (which I’ve failed to get working), or using nvidia-xrun which requires using a tty to use the script to start a new xserver using nvidia drivers. None, and I mean none of these are satisfactory. Bumblebee as always, bad performance. Unmaintained (mostly), primusrun is ancient and fails with Tumbleweed (Leap seems okay due to older libs). Bumblebee on Tumbleweed required installing a 3rd party build of the Mesa libs to be able to run Steam with it. suse-prime, same as ubuntu-prime. nvidia-xrun - try running an Unity built game with it, no mouse cursor, bare xserver, far too much work needed to get a satisfactory environment up. If you however, use a window manager and start your app from that, it seems okay. But still, you need to switch to a tty etc.

Manjaro - By far the easiest to use of the bunch, uses bumblebee - cuts performance.

Sabayon - Bumblebee problems as above.

primusrun and bumblebee no-longer play nice with Steam due to library problems. See openSUSE above.

Seriously, it’s a freaking big mess. About two years ago when i first got my laptop (an MSI GS70 Stealth), using bumblebee and primusrun was fine, it worked and it worked okay-ish with performance at about half of what it could be. Then they became unmaintained, slipped behind the amount of changes that happened in the Linux world such as new GCC and Glibs. I’m lucky!!, if I get bumblebee and primus working acceptably across all use cases; and that is getting harder (try using Steam with it on a modern/rolling distro).

There is no way in hell I’m using Windows to get decent use out of my laptop, that would kill my productivity (I’m a comp-sci & soft-eng student), not to mention that Windows itself is atrocious with its UI (and I can only run W8+on this).

Myself, and likely, a very many others, a growing amount, use Linux exclusively and also use it for gaming. This number will definitely continue to grow but only, only if things such as driver installation for playing games is painless. Distribution installation and setup itself is relatively painless and likely even easier than Windows, this has improved in leaps and bounds over the last decade. Granted, basic nvidia only installation is as easy as next, next, next, it’s just Optimus support that is quite entirely lacking. Especially muxless, with external output connected to the nvidia chip. Heck, even output using intel-virtual-out relies on bumblebee.

Literally the only way this is going to improve is if Nvidia itself improves it. Hackers don’t have the knowledge needed, often have to rely on reverse engineering etc.

Sorry to reiterate my points from earlier, I felt I hadn’t really gotten my points across adequately. I really don’t know how to impress upon Nvidia and the lovely folks working on the Nvidia drivers, how important proper PRIME and easy(bumblebee-like) offloading is. There’s a huge amount of top-notch gaming laptops out there, and it sucks to be chained to Windows if you need to use the Nvidia gpu for anything requiring decent performance.

In short, Nvidia needs to make a promise, a commitment to supporting Linux well beyond the bare essentials. It’s situations like this that hold Linux back, and there is bugger-all even very well intentioned and skilled hackers can do when Nvidia is the one holding all the cards.