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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

I'll bite. Please tell me which laptops have fully supported graphics cards, including dynamic switching between integrated and discreet without reboot.

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I'm not disputing your point, but as a long-time application developer (and of course general computer user), I had to look up what the difference was. I've never had the need to switch between them (that I'm aware of). In what circumstances does it become important?

Do you really not know that?

This is done to save battery life. In most situations the integrated graphics are more than enough, so the dedicated graphics chip can be turned off. If, however, that isn’t transparent to the user (i.e. happens automatically and on the fly) it’s nearly useless. Who is going to bother and reboot to switch graphics?

This is a pretty standard feature, available in all Apple laptops with dedicated graphics and many (if not all) Windows laptops with dedicated graphics.

If you don't mind me asking, what would you be playing under Linux that would require discrete graphics? Modern integrated graphics are much, much better than they were a few years ago and you should be able to play any Source game, for instance, without trouble. Now they won't handle Crysis gracefully, of course, but if you're resorting to running things under wine then you have to expect some level of breakage.

Plenty of other things use GPU other than games.

Yes, I really didn't know that — it had never come up for me. It sounds like it's mostly really useful with games and similarly rendering-intense applications, which I don't use.

Are you familiar with Bumblebee? It provides switching between integrated and discreet graphics without reboot for NVIDIA Optimus-equipped laptops.

Although at the moment it's a manual install, it should find its way into popular distros soon enough.

http://bumblebee-project.org/

Bumblebee works well for me on a Samsung QX411. Once installed, just prepend 'optirun' to any command (like when running a game) and it will use the discrete graphics card.

It's good to hear Bumblebee works now. When I was researching laptops earlier this year I read that it was unstable.

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