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With Valve, nVidia and others doing work to improve Linux gaming, it may soon become a serious gaming platform. Which is fine by me as gaming is the only reason I have a windows computer.

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Until NVIDIA makes Optimus completely functional on Linux and not a pain in the ass to configure, I'm pretty much going to dismiss any claims that Nvidia are working to improve Linux gaming.

Apart from not being able to use vdpau, bumblebee makes Optimus work very well for me. In Windows 7 I have to reboot when I want to switch between the chips, in Linux I just run applications directly or prepend "optirun".

I've also used bumblebee and am generally quite happy with it. But the big drawback of bumblebee over a "proper" implementation is that the rendered frames are copied to the Intel GPU in software. I hope that Dave Airlie's work on hotplug will lead to a better implementation at some point.

They are planning to improve it, but there are issues along the way:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/NVIDIA-wants-to-remov...

Ditto, though it's not like I have time to play any games so poor Win7 is a little dusty. :o)

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