On Mon, 2011-05-16 at 13:13 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
I've also observed before that, if you can manage it, disabling
the
'faster' chipset and using the Intel one permanently is almost always
going to be the best approach on Linux, because the proprietary drivers
don't work with these systems and the free drivers for the Radeon and
NVIDIA chipsets are likely to be slower and buggier than the ones for
the Intel chipsets, even if the Radeon/NVIDIA chips are _theoretically_
more powerful. So there's just about nothing to gain from trying to use
them as 'intended' - running with the Radeon/NVIDIA chip will probably
only make the system buggier, hotter, slower, and more power-hungry.
IMBW, but my take is it's best to try and find a way to lock the system
into the Intel chipset, and just use that; and that's usually going to
be in the BIOS.
Actually, I should refine that - if you really need max performance, you
could lock in the dedicated chipset in the BIOS and use the proprietary
driver, and that should work, with all the usual trade-offs associated
with proprietary drivers. It's the 'hybrid' function specifically that
you can't really use under Linux, because the proprietary drivers don't
support it, and even if you can get the rudimentary support in the open
drivers to work, the open driver for the 'faster' chipset is likely to
be slower than the one for the Intel chip anyway.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net