GNOME Shell Making It Easy To Launch Apps/Games For Optimus / Dual GPU Systems

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Shell Making It Easy To Launch Apps/Games For Optimus / Dual GPU Systems

With the GNOME 3.24 desktop that's currently in development the latest GNOME Shell code has support for easily letting the user launch an app on a dedicated GPU when applicable for handling NVIDIA Optimus use-cases of having integrated and discrete GPU laptops...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Shell-Optimus

[Awesomeness]

Great in theory but in reality: Who launches games not from Steam? Steam has a similar feature request https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/4041 and Valve doesn't touch it.

[michal_229]

I have this extension to GNOME Shell https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/985/optirun/ with bumblebee + nvidia binary drivers and it is working well for me.

[GreatEmerald]

Great in theory but in reality: Who launches games not from Steam? Steam has a similar feature request https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/4041 and Valve doesn't touch it.

Everyone that doesn't use Steam?

[DebianLinuxero]

Great in theory but in reality: Who launches games not from Steam?

Me, for example.

[ssokolow]

Great in theory but in reality: Who launches games not from Steam? Steam has a similar feature request https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/4041 and Valve doesn't touch it.

GOG users like me?

I care enough that I've actually blogged about the wrongness of Steam and I've been experimenting with ideas for writing a Steam Client analogue which doesn't require an external service. (Current state of the in-development Qt frontend rewrite. The sidebar is going to become a treeview which allows custom user-defined tag groups.)

[pal666]

Great in theory but in reality: Who launches games not from Steam? Steam has a similar feature request https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/4041 and Valve doesn't touch it.

now you could launch steam from gnome shell on discrete gpu

[plonoma]

Although dual GPU (discrete +iGPU) is the most pressing use case.
Not having generalised multi-GPU app/program allocation is not good.
It would be a boon for developers to be able to test and benchmark applications with multiple graphics cards on one machine.
Having a standardized, vendor INdependent way to specify which GPU we want our applications to use and general, default settings would be awesome.

[Guest]

Great in theory but in reality: Who launches games not from Steam? Steam has a similar feature request https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ste...ux/issues/4041 and Valve doesn't touch it.

Steam... isn't the only way to play games on Linux.

I play games, but don't have Steam installed since none of the games I play exist on it (I play most things through Wine to be fair, but also some stuff like Xonotic).

[andrebrait]

So, it solves it for AMD cards and nVidia cards using nouveau, but not on NVIDIA binary drivers, right?