Justin Martin

So you’re looking over that snazzy new laptop, drooling at the prospect of dual graphics chipsets; one for power-saving, and the other for blazing-fast gameplay. You’re thinking to yourself “Man, that sounds great! I can save my battery life, while still enjoying top-notch graphics!”

Boy, you’d be wrong.

Optimus is far less than optimal

Today I got my brand-spanking-new performance laptop from Eurocom (a great company, by the way; I have nothing against them, except that perhaps they didn’t warn me of this). I spent hours fawning over it, inspecting each minor detail of the hardware, installing Windows 7, and then Ubuntu Maverick.

The install process was fairly uneventful, and I was quite surprised at the resolution I got when it finally booted. Nearly twice what I’m accustomed to, on a 17″ monitor. I had some problems with the WLAN NIC, which I still haven’t gotten working.

After all of the drivers were installed, and the system was set up to a reasonable degree, I decided to break the new beast in. I installed Steam, and downloaded Counter-Strike 1.6.

Upon trying to start the game, much to my immediate glee and then dismay, the Intel graphics clicked off, and the nVidia graphics clicked on. And then the nVidia graphics clicked off, and the Intel graphics clicked on. And then Counter-Strike clicked off.

Huh. That was weird. Maybe it was just a first-start glitch. Let’s try again.

Huh. Nope, it’s definitely not working. Let’s try disabling the automatic mode while I turn the game on, and then enabling it when I’m in-game. Oh, there we go! The game’s running. Now I’ll just join my favourite server and… WHAT? 20 FPS? That’s… abysmal. What’s going on here?

Well, apparently the higher-end graphics hadn’t kicked in, and I was stuck using the Intel graphics, which, I must tell you, are absolutely terrible. Like, at least as bad as the graphics on my desktop system which is built from spare parts I scraped together, which are probably all at least half a decade old.

What are settings for if not to configure things?

Obviously, the next step was to try to disable the Intel graphics, or at least manually toggle the higher-end graphics on. I peeked into the nVidia control panel, and found, to my immediate glee and then utter dismay, that there is indeed a way of configuring which applications trigger the graphics switch, but those settings don’t do jack shit! You can set all of the “preferred” graphics settings you want, but it seems like that’s all they are to the hardware: preferred.

Setting the global preference to the higher-end chipset doesn’t do anything. It’s a dummy switch of some sort. As well, you cannot set per-application configurations for any application that’s not already whitelisted by nVidia. It’ll let you select the application, but the configuration fields are all locked from changes.

Buyer’s remorse

I’m sure you can understand how frustrating it is to drop $1300 on a new laptop, which is money you didn’t really have in the first place, to find that it’s fundamentally incapable of operating as advertised, due in whole to nVidia Optimus.

I’m going to be calling Eurocom’s support tomorrow to see what can be done, but I’m not hopeful. Short of a refund or replacement with another laptop, I have no idea what they can do. It’s something inherent in the technology that is broken, instead of it being an OEM defect or damage.

So, I reiterate: Do not purchase anything with nVidia Optimus technology until this issue is addressed by nVidia. You’re buying a super-expensive netbook.