I have an Asus-n552vw laptop that has two graphic cards:

1- intel HD graphics 530
2- nvidia Geforce GTX960m

And installed ubuntu 16.04.2. I don't know which graphic is in use at the moment and are they installed good or not? because when I trying to suspend, it gives me PCIe Error and I should do hard power off.

I have also Windows10 beside Ubuntu and it uses intel 530 graphic by default and it only use the nvidia 960m card when I run some softwares like solidworks.

I like to know how the Ubuntu works and how can I switch off the 960m and only use 530 on Ubuntu? Also solve the suspension problem!

3

2 Answers

I don't have dual GPU laptop anymore to test it, but used to, this sounds like NVIDIA Optimus (for switching between cards), on Linux this is handled by the bumblebee project.

I believe it's in the universe/multiverse repo (universe is community maintained software, multiverse copyright restricted software). If for some reason these are not enabled on your machine (in case it complains it can't find the software), you can enable them with

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
sudo apt-get update

To install bumblebee

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic primus
reboot

Now it should default to your intel gpu (for power saving reasons) on everything, to start an application with your dedicated card instead, you start it with the "optirun application-to-start" command, as in:

optirun blender
optirun nvidia-settings
...

2

The GTX 960m is obviously going to be a lot faster than an Intel HD card, so you'll most likely want to switch to that. Here's how you do it

ctrl+alt+t for terminal, then copy and paste this

sudo apt install nvidia-352

enter your password for installation, then reboot. Your system should default to your nVidia card now.

1

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