Hello, I wanted to see if running bumblebee is a good method of switching the GPU back to linux after running a VM. Maybe this will be of use to someone.

I ran all of my benchmarks on Unigine Heaven on OpenGL at 1920x1080 8xAA fullscreen on ultra quality with Extreme Tessellation. My VM setup consists of KVM/Qemu with virt-manager frontend. Sound comes through pulseaudio/ich9 as other sound settings gave me an FPS drop.

Here is my hardware and other stats.

System: Host: warden Kernel: 4.9.8-1-ARCH x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 6.3.1)

      Desktop: Cinnamon 3.2.8 (Gtk 3.22.8) Distro: Antergos Linux

Machine: Device: desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: PRIME Z270-A v: Rev 1.xx

      UEFI [Legacy]: American Megatrends v: 0701 date: 12/27/2016

CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-7700K (-HT-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB

      flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 33612

      clock speeds: max: 4700 MHz 1: 799 MHz 2: 1458 MHz 3: 1974 MHz

      4: 800 MHz 5: 799 MHz 6: 1298 MHz 7: 854 MHz 8: 799 MHz

Graphics: Card-1: Intel Device 5912 bus-ID: 00:02.0

      Card-2: NVIDIA GP104 [GeForce GTX 1070] bus-ID: 01:00.0

      Display Server: X.Org 1.19.1 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) FAILED: modesetting

      Resolution: [email protected]

      GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 1070/PCIe/SSE2

      GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 375.26 Direct Rendering: Yes

A bar graph of this data can be seen here on imgur.

Different compression methods for the virtualGL bridge are mostly not worth it. Only RGB compression actually gives a performance increase over using no compression. However, no method compares to using the primus bridge.

Using the primus bridge results in enourmous performance gains. I was puzzled until I read more about how x-server and bumblebee works (Rendering in a separate xserver). I decided to test Unigine Heaven in a different xserver by switching to a different tty and running heaven from there.

xinit ./heaven -- :1

So it seems by having the iGPU render the desktop, the dGPU can focus solely on the application being focused on.

Running a separate xserver for games might work for some people, but it's not my cup of tea. I am really happy with bumblebee and primus and it will be my setup for a while.

tl;dr: bumblebee and primus good.

edit: formatting galore