I’ve just spent several hours wrestling with my Optimus hobbled Dell laptop (Inspiron 7567 if anyone is curious.) Thanks to Optimus, Vulkan is a no go killing any hope of getting DX11 games to run with DXVK/Proton/SteamPlay. Though it’ll take a while to arrange the necessary financing, does anyone have recommendations for a non-Optimus laptop for Linux and DXVK gaming…? I was thinking that perhaps a Kaby Lake G laptop might be an interesting option - assuming the Vega GPU is well supported by Linux.
I realized that I had a suitable candidate in my scrap heap. I have a Dell Precision M6600 that had been victimized by a liter of Diet Coke. It still boots, but it has issues. The CPU will downclock to as low as 100MHz, but I fixed that by disabling C-states. And the keyboard is toast, but that’s fixable.
Best of all it has a dedicated AMD FirePro M6100 that will run with the amdgpu driver, though getting it working was non-trivial. And there’s no hybrid graphics B.S. I’m still testing, but intend to replace the keyboard and see if this thing’s a viable Linux gaming laptop…
However, I only succeeded in borking my Nvidia drivers (wow, what a surprising outcome.) Since I wanted Vulkan+DXVK support anyway, I started over and upgraded to Debian Buster from Stretch. Having a separate /home partition made switching (relatively) easy.
I then tried following the guide again, but added some missing pieces. I added “DRI_PRIME=1” to /etc/environment and “nvidia-drm.modeset=1” to the default kernel options in /etc/default/grub. And now I have a fully Nvidia desktop without futzing around with Bumblebee or primus. Unigine Superposition runs with ~35fps on 1080p Medium and vulkan-smoketest returns promising results.
So it looks I saved myself $1000 - $1500 on a new laptop, assuming I can get WINE, DXVK and all the other goodies working.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, the Coke got its final revenge and totaled my other laptop.