I have an Asus G750JW with a GeForce 765m with Optimus. I want to install Arch on it, when I get a SSD to replace the HDD, but I am not sure about the Optimus end of things. How do I get the Nvidia GPU working, and what performance can I expect? Also, if you know of a way to disable the Intel GPU and just use the 765m let me know (couldn't find an option in bios so I don't think I can).
I run optimus, it works. Arch wiki has a super useful page on bumblebee (the way to use optimus on Linux).
You can expect pretty much the same performance as if you were running your card with windows's optimus. There's a bit of overhead/latency but nothing that can be noticed.
You can't just disable the IGPU.
Optimus works like this:
- IGPU run's the screen
- GPU process and run the program in an other X session
- GPU passes the results to the IGPU
I will have to take a look at bumblebee.
I have only tried optimus with the proprietary drivers drivers on ubuntu-based stuff and they seem to work well. Not sure about Arch.
Bumblebee is the open source alternative but its a bit hit and miss. Most of the times though its work pretty well. It a good choice to try first.
The only one that works is bumblebee in conjunction with the proprietary drivers in arch from my experience.. All the other stuff causes breakage