GTX 770M with RHEL 6.4

Dear experts,

I have a Toshiba Qosmio X75 with a GeForce GTX 770M on which I am running RHEL 6.4 (x86_64). I have installed the standard kmod-nvidia.x6_64, nvidia-detect.x86_64, and nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64 packages from El Repo (community enterprise linux repository), all version 325.15, but with no luck. Specifically when I run nvidia-detect, no compatible devices are found with the following output:


Probing for supported NVIDIA devices…
[8086:0416] Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
No NVIDIA devices were found.

Does this mean that I won’t be able to get this card working in Linux? Specifically I ran across this:

“in particular, notebook and all-in-one desktop designs with switchable (hybrid) or Optimus graphics will not work if means to disable the integrated graphics in hardware are not available”

on the official support page. From what I understand, the Bumblebee project is attempting to bring Optimus support to Linux, but I am somewhat hazy on the details. Any ideas on what I can do to get this graphics card working?

Thanks.

I’m not sure how polished RedHat’s support is towards out-of-box working Optimus cards – probably not much so as you’ve found out.

Bumblebee will let you use your nvidia graphics card, but you’d first want to uninstall any NVIDIA drivers, as bumblebee will install those and configure itself with them. That being said, sometimes it takes a bit of tweaking to get working, especially on bleeding edge hardware.

I believe Optimus cards should be supported natively on Ubuntu 12.04.3, as it installs nvidia-prime and the nvidia drivers along side it. The benefits of that is no need to do the ‘optirun’ syntax everytime you want to run a GPU-enabled app. The disadvantage is your graphics card would be on all the time, cutting down on battery life.

I personally run Ubuntu 13.10 and I configured Bumblebee from the repositories and upgraded to a 3.12-rc kernel to get Bumblebee working and patched NVIDIA drivers to work with the new kernel. With bumblebee, you do have power management working so your battery life would be better.