I am currently using a Toshiba Satellite Pro C70-A. This laptop and many new laptops that are mid range are using Optimus Chipsets.
Optimus is specifically designed for Windows and natively isnt supported on any flavour of linux.
Because of the lack of support for linux a project was started called bumblebee.
Bumblebee is a project aiming to support NVIDIA Optimus technology under Linux.
Go over to here to get more information on installation, its pretty straight forward.
After you have successfully installed bumblebee, bumblebee services will start on boot and no furthur action is required on your part at this stage.
To start bumblebee with mplayer for example simply type 'primusrun mplayer'
Now that all well and good but not great. Not great by any means. The performance here isnt rather poor and you wont be very impressed.
If however you run optimus with the vblank option you will see a hug increase in performance.
In order to do this following the same example above, type
vblank_mode=0 primusrun /usr/bin/mplayer film.avi
The speed increase is huge but will vary form machine to machine. The video below show this in action.
Useful Links
http://bumblebee-project.org/
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/optimus_technology_uk.html
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