Re: [Usability] Narrowing specifically on dual-chip video cards etc

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mercredi 30 novembre 2011 à 22:57 +0100, Florian Ludwig a écrit :
> Hi Teunis,
> 
> I didn't read your whole mail, just:
> 
> On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 10:19 -0800, Teunis Peters wrote:
> > In the presence of a dual-video-chip system, secondary chip should
> > only be enabled when high-performance graphics is necessary.  (not by
> > default, and not anywhere in the shell)
> > OS provides switch capability. 
> 
> You are right, the OS provides the capabilities. But to my knowledge no
> OS that GNOME runs on (Linux, *bsd, etc) does so. If there is support
> for this on the horizon you might bring up your ideas on the right
> mailing list again. Skimming over your mail it seems not usability
> related so not this one. Maybe check gnome-shell instead. But as I said,
> currently there is no point in discussing this at all anywhere at GNOME.
Yeah, that's really not a problem with GNOME. First, X.org and the
drivers would need to support live selection of the GPU, which AFAIK
isn't possible ATM. And then, you'd need to create an API to allow the
desktop to switch between GPUs.

Then only, you'd need a design to know when to switch. "GPU-intensive"
apps isn't something easy to define: I don't think you want to use your
powerful GPU when a random Flash ad appears on a Web page. And when you
play a video, if the integrated (less powerful) GPU is enough, you want
to stick to it to save power, even if this kind of task might appear as
GPU-intensive: it depends on the codec/quality, i.e. whether the
integrated card is enough or not. The only simple case is that when
games or 3D rendering apps are started, you probably want the most
powerful GPU.

But all this discussion sounds pretty hand-wavy since we don't have
concrete cases where it works...