I have have a Lenovo Y510P laptop which has 2 gpus: one is Intel HD4600 and the other is Nvidia GT750m. I have already installed the latest Nvidia drivers that work fine. The problem is that you are only allowed to work with one of them: either Intel through “prime” or “Nvidia” but not both, and with each choice you always need to reboot. In Windows you can easily specify which games or programs that you want to run with Nvidia. I guess this is not an easy task or ought to be in UM and Linux Distros in general. I Hope someone might come with better solution for dual GPUs since some new PCs and laptops nowadays come with a low consuming gpu used for regular tasks and another one used for gaming and programs that demand a lot of resources. I just want want to raise this issue and hope Ubuntu community work on it. No doubt that there are new good games available for Linux (through Steam for example), but much work need to be done for this matter.
You might look at installing bumblebee to see if it allows GPU switching without reboot. Don’t know if it will work with your hardware but here it works fine with the following hardware under Debian testing:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
1:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 630M] (rev ff)
The homepage is here: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ
Also, I have installed it in Mate using apt-get but haven’t done any testing yet.
I have installed Bumblebee as you mentioned but that doesn’t work. Maybe it doesn’t work under 15.04. I guess the setup wouldn’t be easy for new users mainly those shifting from Windows.
I have bumblebee working in Mate 15.04 by following this link after installing bumblebee-nvidia:
http://rajat-osgyan.blogspot.in/2015/03/p-margin-bottom-0.html
To test I used dpkg to install virtualgl_2.4_amd64.deb from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualgl/files/2.4/
To test I did:
cd /opt/VirtualGL/bin/
./glxspheres64 (gives about 60 fps)
optirun ./glxspheres64 (gives about 120 fps)
optirun ./glxspheres64
I followed the steps mentioned but nothing seems to work. Now I’m thinking to reinstall the whole OS cause I lost some functionality. Thanks anyway.