Will the IGP of current i5 processor notebooks be used?

I mean will there be a software or driver fix to enable switchable graphics on supported i5+HM board+discrete Nvidia GT 3xx or ATI 5xxx?
Thanks for help

 

There's no chance of switchable graphics with ATI unless the motherboard has been modified, so a software or driver fix won't do the job there.
As for systems with i5 and 40nm Nvidia GPUs, as long as the motherboard isn't PM55 switchable graphics is possible, but you would have to internally change the wiring so that the video output comes from the Intel GMA HD chip rather than the Nvidia GPU.

 

Thank you for the reply.
Is optimus a software or a hardware component?

 

Unfortunately it's both. It needs the software, and then there needs to be a physical connector, like lackofcheese said. Switchable graphics isn't standard even though the processor has an onboard graphics. For switchable graphics with i5 you need 3 main things

1. HM5* chipset
2. Proper connectors on processor and graphics card
3. driver support

 

It's not just HM55 and HM57, QM57 and QS57 also support IGP. PM55 is the only one that doesn't. All of these chipsets have the right ports for the IGP to output a video signal, so I think it should be possible, but you would have to manually change the wiring.
Also, Optimus requires the Optimus Copy Engine, which is a hardware component in the GPU; it's only included in the 40nm Nvidia GPUs.

 

As long as these motherboard have the correct wiring, Isn't it more natural to have multiplexer to choose internal or external GPU even from the BIOS like the built in VGA desktop boards?

 

no, one of the achievements of optimus was to remove the need for a hardware multiplexer. i recommend the optimus launch article on anandtech for a detailed discussion.

 

I think khaledseif is discussing multiplexing to choose which card is active, which is not the same as multiplexing the video output. On a desktop, the video cards have their own outputs, separate from the IGP outputs on the motherboard.

I have to assume that a laptop with HM55 and a discrete GPU but no multiplexer and not meant for Optimus would just have unused video connectors on the motherboard for the IGP. It might be easy to switch the connectors from the dGPU to the IGP, but I haven't seen the internals of an HM55 laptop so I can't say for sure.

 

Yes, this is understood. In his launch article on Anandtech, Jarred wrote

NVIDIA's generation two essentially differed in that it eliminated a need for a hardware multiplexer; the switch between graphics adapters became controlled by software.

Optimus (which you may call generation three) eliminated the multiplexers that route the video signal. It can do without since it just copies over from the GPU framebuffer into the IGP frame buffer and uses the IGP to output the video.

In summary: in the old days, there used to be multiplexers to choose between video "cards" and multiplexers to route the video signal to the internal LCD or to VGA/HDMI/etc ports. With Optimus, all of these multiplexers are gone. One main advantage of that is that NVIDIA graphics with Optimus require no special motherboards.

 

Yea someone needs to check this out, alas I do not have the equipment.