Hi all,
We have recently bought a few good laptops (Lenovo W520) to be able to
work at customers' sites, and these come equipped with Intel graphics
AND an nVidia Quadro 2000M discrete card. They are supposed to use
(buzzword alert) nVidia's Optimus technology to automatically switch
between the two based on the app that's currently running.
This seems to work well for games I've tried (all based on DirectX). The
games clearly don't use the integrated graphics, they run well on high
settings (the same I use on my desktop that has a GTX470).
However, our own OSG-based apps seem to not be recognized as "needing
the discrete graphics", and even adding a profile for our app's
executable in nVidia Control Panel, telling it to force using the
discrete graphics for that app, doesn't work. Our app crashes when
loading textures, somewhere in the Intel driver.
I haven't tested other OpenGL apps. I will soon.
As I see it I have 2 options:
1. Switch to discrete graphics only in the BIOS. I've tried this and it
works, but I'd either have to accept the higher battery usage when I'm
not using a graphics app, or have to reboot and switch back manually
depending on the situation. So it's inconvenient.
2. Write to nVidia to see if they have any hints about how to make
Optimus see that our app needs the discrete graphics. Maybe there's a
call we can make at the start of our main() that would be a hint to the
OpenGL driver? Actually I would have thought that any time OpenGL is
used at all (context created, etc.) it would switch to discrete, so this
may be a bug in the driver if it's not the case.
Has anyone had any experience with this technology? I think it's a good
idea, if it worked well it would really be the best of both worlds - low
battery usage when no 3D apps are running, and speed when you need it.
But as it stands it's a bit inconvenient.
Thanks in advance,
J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay jean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com
http://www.cm-labs.com/
http://whitestar02.dyndns-web.com/
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