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Comment by shahbazac | Hacker News Reader

Is it really very difficult to get nVidia GPUs working with linux?

I wanted to buy a laptop with a GPU for CUDA experiments.

I was looking at Lenovo Yoga 710 (14 inch with nvidia gpu). Am I going to have a bad time dual booting a linux distribution?

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I've had mixed experiences with different GPUs very hard to tell. Laptop Quadro Series? Yes 750ti desktop? No 970 desktop? Sorta. It's unfortunate but it really seems to depend not only on platform but specific version of platform.

It's a mess.

Someone else in the thread said what I completely agree with if possible just get the latest Intel HD series it works pretty much flawlessly.

For desktop PCs, not at all, Nvidia GPUs are very easy to get working and will give the best performance.

In modern laptops, you usually have the complication of 'optimus' which allows you to switch between the onboard Intel graphics and the Nvidia GPU. This can be a bit awkward to get working, but it's improved recently. I've had plenty of issues getting it working right on Windows too.

Yeah... the optimus crap has serious problems. It causes my GPU driver to crash on Windows while I'm trying to give demos at work (not exactly a great look when your screen goes black and then your application's 3d display dies). It's not exactly the most stable thing, but can be great for power consumption.

On my T530, there's a firmware option to set the graphics to discrete-only, integrated-only, or optimus. The downside to discrete-only is the power usage. The downside to integrated-only is that the displayport won't work.

All three work great in Windows of course. For Linux, integrated-only is best, followed by discrete-only, and I've never had success with optimus.

I have a W530 that allows you to set it the same way. In my experience, you are ALWAYS better off to pick one or the other and leave it there. Some folks have had success with Bumblebee [0], however.

It's my understanding that newer Thinkpads don't have the BIOS option to switch and that this is much more of a PITA to get working.

[0]: http://bumblebee-project.org

I have a T460p with a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card, and it runs just fine under Ubuntu 16.04 with the newest drivers. Steam also runs fine.

With AMD/ATI, the problem was driver fglrx driver bitrot more than anything else, but that's been deprecated in favour of the newer amdgpu drive, which actually has some hope of being maintained due to its open source nature.

You shouldn't have issues with Nvidia hardware though.

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