LinuxGameNetwork
Nvidia has just publicly released driver 435.17 to their beta branch. Among the list of changes is support for PRIME offload render. Offload render is the ability to have an X screen rendered by one GPU while certain applications can be offloaded to another GPU.
This hugely benefits laptops and other mobile computers because now most rendering can take place on the integrated graphics chip, reducing power consumption during most tasks. While heavy loads can still take place on a discrete GPU when the additional compute is needed.
On top of this, Nvidia has added experimental support for something it calls runtime D3 power management. This allows the discrete GPU to completely shut off in low usage situations which greatly reduces power consumption and battery life. Only mobile Turing-based GPUs will be able to take advantage of this addition which means GTX 1650, RTX 2060 or newer.
For Ubuntu 18.04 and 19.04 users that are interested in testing these new features, and have compatible hardware, there is already a PPA containing the patched X.Org. However, Nvidia's EGL Streams are not supported yet which means this will only work on X for now, no Wayland yet.
