Hi,
I recently switched from Bumblebee to nvidia-prime on Ubuntu 13.10 (still in dev).
My hardware is a Asus N43SL (Intel HD3000 + nvidia 540m GT)
I encounter two main bugs :
Suspend/resume is broken : every time I resume, the screen hangs, and I have to do a VT switch to get it moving again. I also have to unplug/replug my USB mouse to get it detected again. Desktop is garbled, but switching wallpaper gets read of the black and white squares.
When I use my touchpad, screen regularly freezes. That doesn’t happen when i use my USB mouse. That doesn’t happen when I’m using Bumblebee instead of nvidia-prime. I can work around it by VT switching.
Where do I start to help fixing these bugs ? (which logs to get ?)
Did those issues occur when on Bumblebee? Thanks for bringing nvidia-prime to my attention, I wasn’t aware of it, I’ll be doing a Saucy install in the next week or so on a Haswell Core i5-4200U + NVIDIA GT740m (GK208) and might try it to see how it performs.
No, nvidia-prime and Bumblebee should absolutely not be present on a system at the same time. They are two completely different pieces of software and share nothing in common, and will break each other.
These issues do not happen when using Bumblebee.
nvidia-prime takes advantage of RandR 1.4 support in the nvidia binary driver (>319), to configure the intel driver as the “passive” one. Everything is then managed by the nvidia driver (desktop and other apps), in a much more efficient way than what Bumblebee does (basically, higher fps in 3D games).
This means you get much better performance, but you cannot switch off the nvidia dedicated GPU. So your laptop’s battery is drained much faster, and you may experience heat issues. VSync is also not managed, so tearing may appear.
I would not recommand using nvidia-prime for now, or only with a testing purpose. For a much more stable system, cooler laptop and longer battery life, stick with Bumblebee.
Nvidia prime with nvidia optimums 319 drivers are installed by default if one does a fresh install of latest Ubuntu 12.04.3 on a hybrid laptop. It did so on both my ASUS Zenbook ultra and i7 K55VM with nvidia cards. I did a fresh install to find both nvidia 319 and nvidia-prime installed on the system. So far there has only been a slight loss of battery life compared to previous bumblebee setup. Also heat gain is not that bad rising up two degrees over past.
I didn’t realize that nvidia-prime was basically the same RandR 1.4 support, makes sense. I do mostly CUDA work on Linux, so probably bumblebee is more than adequate, but I’ll have to try both. The pain is that I’ll also have a 7260 AC card, for which I need the 3.10 kernel and some backports to make it work, hopefully I can find a working solution given the thread regarding 3.10 crashes w/ NVIDIA 325 drivers… might have to stick with 319 if my setup is affected.
Acer Intel® Core™ i7-3630QM CPU @ 2.40GHz × 8 with GeForce GT 730M/PCIe/SSE2
using ubuntu 13.10 dev beta installed on SSD. i loaded nividia-prime but it also isntalled the lightDM which i think is light locker, can i remove thsi and hor do i remove it. also system will hang and only option is power button to shutdown. not sure if that is related to the nvidia-prime but only started to happen after that was installed. i like this better than the bumblebee method
The issue with Ubuntu is that installing nvida drivers enables nvidia-prime which definitely runs games with good FPS, however Optimus support is not like the one in Windows where depending on need nvidia card is seamlessly switched on and off. Here its on all the time and the Intel graphics is used as sink. The problem with that is heat, battery consumption so if you are not an avid gamer, bumblebee is perfect solution for now till nvidia comes out with switching like in Windows. With nvidia-prime, you can’t install bumblebee and without it, no nvidia driver install in Ubuntu.
I have this exact same problem
To install i ran sudo apt-get install nvidia-319 nvidia-common nvidi-prime
Games work awsome however this bug the work around is to crtl+alt+f1 then back to f7.
An update to my problem.
I only noticed today that when i plug in my USB flash disks or my Huawii modem my machined seemed to start stuttering in movement of the mouse.
As when i move the mouse across the screen it is jerky. i don’t know how best to describe it.
The system slows down as well.
I did try to reboot, problem persisted.
As soon as i removed packages