Optimus - what is it and why isn't it available?

Hi

Im a noob when it comes to this and I'm just wondering if someone can explain to me what optimus is in layman's terms and why its not available on the 8130's 560m.

ty

 

Optimus = GPU-switching technology to save battery life. When the notebook isn't gaming, the technology allows the system to choose the integrated graphics for activation, saving energy consumption until really necessary.

Clevo have never enabled Optimus technology for any of their models sporting 460m and above, it seems the trend has continued into the 5-series probably because of the way they've designed their chipset for their laptop models.

For more info, the wikipedia entry does a great job at summarizing the functions.

 

Google really is at your finger tips on this one - AnandTech - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M: High-End Mobile Graphics with Optimus

Article posted today....

Some systems don't support Optimus with higher end cards yet. Someday yes (hopefully) but Sager isn't there yet.

 

Every manufacturer decides whether to implement this or not. Clevo has not yet made this available for the higher end cards up to now. Sorry.

Nvidia Optimus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Optimus is the name that nvidia's marketing division came up with of a feature that points basically to shortcoming of their GPUs, namely that they are less efficient than intel's integrated graphics. As the latter are becoming ever more powerful that would leave the low and mid range of nvidia's line up basically unsellable because for most users the loss in battery life would not be justified by the modest performance increase. 560M is a high end card, as such it suffers less from this consideration as there still is a huge performance gap. For these cards the manufacturer must weight implementation of Optimus against the drawbacks: the rendering becomes indirect, it depends on driver support (only windows 7 atm, no linux or other OS), it costs in terms of fps (drivers have to sync), in terms of reliability (some games don;t work well) and it is not possible to drive 3D screens.

 

I'd wager the main reason it's unavailable in Clevo-based machines is because PunkBuster and Optimus don't particularly like each other; resulting in you being banned from servers for suspected cheating. I know it sounds kind of out there, but Google around, and you'll see!

 

Most, if not all, of the Punkbuster issues were fixed in the 265.xx and higher driver sets.

 

For a system with a 460M/560M/485M card, if Optimus was enabled to allow the system to basically switch off the Nvidia GPU and use the IGP (integrated graphics processor) in the new Intel Sandy Bridge GPUs, I'd say you have a chance of doubling your battery life. You don't need the high end gaming features of the Nvidia GPU when you are not gaming and most people will want the battery life for doing work or surfing the net etc. That said, the IGP isn't any slouch and itself can handle some lower levels of gaming on it's own. The key is that the IGP is built into the CPU and requires much less power and runs much cooler than the Nvidia GPU.

That's a huge thing actually. Alienware has Optimus and Quick Sync going (another name for the same thing basically).

It needs to be implemented in the hardware so we can't expect a software patch down the line. Clevo hasn't done it on the higher end gaming systems for an inexplicable reason. Either there were too many bugs early on when they were developing it (Nvidia hadn't patched the major problems yet) or they ran into other issues. We may see Optimus/Quick Sync down the line but it will have to be in future models.

It's not impossible though however, as other manufacturers have done it.

So the gist of it is Optimus is Nvidia's marketing name for "our cards are hot and suck a lot of power so we'll let the CPU handle the graphics for awhile".