Optimus laptop + wine, does it really works ?

Questions about Wine on Linux
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aNewWineUser
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Joined: Mon Jan 08, 2018 5:44 pm

Optimus laptop + wine, does it really works ?

Post by aNewWineUser »

Hello,
I have an optimus pc with Debian 9.
I can use optirun/primusrun to use the NVIDIA graphic card instead of the integrated one.
I can also use it with the optirun bash -c "command" trick when it use a launcher or else (like steam).

To verify that I am using the NVIDIA graphic cards with apps, I probe it via the followings commands :
- optirun watch nvidia-smi : to monitor nvidia gpu usage + list process using NVIDIA graphic card (=> does work for DOTA2 on steam for instance)
- optirun --status : to know how many apps run with optirun

But this doesn't seems to work for wine (Path of exile is my example)
I tried the following commands :
- optirun wine 'pathOfMyExe' => both probes are negative regarding the use of NVIDIA
- primusrun wine 'pathOfMyExe' => both probes are negative regarding the use of NVIDIA
- optirun bash -c "wine 'pathOfMyExe'" => optirun --status give +1 application when the game is launched, but nothing move for nvidia-smi
- primusrun bash -c "wine 'pathOfMyExe'" => both probes are negatives regarding the use of NVIDIA

So questions are :
- Does any of those commands really permit us to use NVIDIA graphic card with wine ? :
- if yes, why nvidia-smi doesn't realize that the card is in use ? How can I probe accurately the GPU ?
- if no, is there any way to use bumblebee/optirun/primusrun with wine ?

Thanks by advance,
Regards,
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Bob Wya
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Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2010 7:40 pm

Re: Optimus laptop + wine, does it really works ?

Post by Bob Wya »

@aNewWineUser

A much more accurate way to test your Wine applications is with the wgl debug channel...
E.g.

Code: Select all

export WINEDEBUG=+wgl
optirun wine 'pathOfMyExe'
When you run an Windows application requiring DirectX support this channel will spit out some (stdout) information about what graphics card Wine is rendering to.
I'm afraid it's up to you to sort out issues - like Wine only seeing the Intel iGP card.
That's a system configuration issue.

I know there are detailed Wikis for running hybrid graphics setups on Arch Linux and Gentoo - which I've read through...
I'm sure there are equally useful Wiki guides for Debian.

Both hybrid setups (Bumblebee and Prime) are a bit fraught with issues from what I've read... :cry:
Thankfully the Haswell CPU's iGP is disabled in my laptop's hardware.
I've never seen the point of Nvidia's Primus anyway - since both GPU's are powered all the time...

Bob
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