Nvidia Optimus is a technology available for notebooks, used to increases battery life by switching the dedicated GPU off when it's not needed and then switching it on again when it's needed. When the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip is used.





Nvidia Optimus GPU switching is officially only supported on Windows 7, but it's also unofficially available on Linux thanks to the Bumblebee project





Server / client re-written in C which provides increased performance and reliability

Automatic power management which also survives suspend

Improved error detection and reporting

Better system integration

Switch to Upstart startup mechanism

acpi_call has been replaced with bbswitch and vga_switcheroo

Nouveau support for the Ubuntu PPA package

"optirun --status" will now show the current status of Bumblebee and the secondary GPU on your system

Xorg configuration greatly simplified, provided defaults usually work out of the box.

via Linux Hybrid Graphics

has been released yesterday - here are the release highlights:The complete changelog can be found here Please note that I do not own a Nvidia Optimus powered device so I couldn't test this!(instructions for Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu - PPA included, and installation from source). Oh, and to use it, you obviously need a Nvidia Optimus powered notebook.