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I have a new Lenovo t520 with 8gb memory and a i7 cpu. It's the first time I 'really' install Ubuntu on a pc. I have about six months of experience with Ubuntu as a guest OS on Windows in a VM.

Now what is really annoying me is how slow the visuals are on my laptop. Mostly noticeable when I have to resize or move a window. Also when scrolling text in vim/browsers it's not really as smooth as I would like it.

I read that Lenovo is using Optimus drivers for their new laptops and that these aren't supported. So I was wondering could using the integrated Intel gpu be the problem?

The CPU I have is the Core™ i7-2620M (2.70GHz, 4MB L3, 1333MHz FSB). I have tried to enable desktop effects but that didn't work.

Jorge Castro
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Pickels
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2 Answers2

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Have a look at the bumblebee solution in this page:
https://launchpad.net/~hybrid-graphics-linux
You will be able to use both the intel card for the desktop and the nvidia card for specific applications. Check the google-chrome FPS values for benchmarking:

sudo apt-get install git
# type password
git clone http://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee.git
cd bumblebee/
sudo ./install.sh
optirun glxgears
# check the speed and compare to running:
glxgears
# If you have google-chrome installed, you can try it with/without optirun and report the FPS values on the mailing list:
optirun google-chrome http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html
719016
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The integrated GPU does indeed have worse performance compared to a discrete one. NVidia Optimus is completly unsupported in Ubuntu. If you're lucky, there might be a BIOS switch to switch between the discrete graphic card (nvidia) an the integrated GPU (i7).

Lekensteyn
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