Nvidia Optimus

Nvidia Optimus is a technology from Nvidia that will help in notebooks energy to be saved in order to increase the battery life. For this, the more powerful graphics card is designed to function automatically to the internal only when necessary. The technology is intended primarily for laptops or other mobile devices.

Optimus is the successor of the so-called " hybrid power" technique in which the user is manually added to the switch dedicated graphics card and had to take about 15 seconds, screen flicker in purchasing. Requirement for the use of Optimus is an operating system that can deal with multiple graphics cards drivers, such as Windows 7 Here, the driver will automatically detect if the launched by the user application requires a fast graphics chip and starts where appropriate to these. The driver evaluates DirectX, DXVA and CUDA function calls and compares them with pre-defined profiles, which looked like the SLI profiles in multi- GPU systems. These profiles are updated regularly from Nvidia via an online update.

Is the dedicated graphics card active, it writes the image information in the memory of the internal graphics card, which is only responsible for the output of the image. So you can switch between the two graphics cards without flickering. The PCI Express bus will be making more than enough bandwidth. For this copy operation, a separate chip on the potent graphics card is responsible, which is why it should come to no performance penalties.

Starting from kernel v3.12, there is a Linux driver which supports Optimus technology. Nvidia is working on a proprietary Linux driver with Optimus support, a first beta version is available. However, there is the open source project Bumblebee, which makes it possible ( such as games ) use the dedicated graphics card in Linux for certain applications.

Models

Distinction can be made between models for the desktop and models for the notebook.

Desktop

  • NVS 450
  • NVS 420
  • NVS 300
  • NVS 295

Notebook

  • NVS 4200M
  • NVS 3100M
  • NVS 2100M
  • Quadro 5010M
  • Quadro 4000M
  • Quadro 3000M
  • Quadro 2000M
  • Quadro 1000M
DirectX Video Acceleration Chipset Nvidia ION Tesla (microarchitecture)
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