Use Nvidia Experimental 310 Drivers With Bumblebee

The Bumblebee PPA has been updated today, and the packages now allow the latest "nvidia-experimental-310" drivers to be used with Bumblebee.

Nvidia GeForce driver 310 is said to "double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming" and it can be installed from the "updates" Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 repository. Below you'll find instructions on how to configure Bumblebee to work with nvidia-experimental-310 driver.

Nvidia Optimus is a technology used to increases battery life by switching between two graphics adapters (a low-performance integrated Intel graphics adapter and a high-performance one by Nvidia) within a computer system. Optimus GPU switching is officially only supported on Windows, but it's also unofficially available on Linux thanks to the Bumblebee project.

How to configure Bumblebee to work with nvidia-experimental-310 driver

1. Install Bumblebee if you haven't already.

2. Install the Nvidia GeForce driver 310.14 experimental driver:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-experimental-310 nvidia-settings-experimental-310

3. Configure Bumblebee to use nvidia-experimental-310.

Open "/etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf" as root with a text editor:

gksu gedit /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

And change the following:

- on line 22, make sure "Driver=" is set to "nvidia", like this:
Driver=nvidia

- change the "KernelDriver=" (on line 47) to "nvidia-experimental-310", like this:
KernelDriver=nvidia-experimental-310

- change "LibraryPath=" (on line 51) to "/usr/lib/nvidia-experimental-310:/usr/lib32/nvidia-experimental-310", so it looks like this:
LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-experimental-310:/usr/lib32/nvidia-experimental-310

- change the "XorgModulePath=" (line 54) to "XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-experimental-310/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" so it looks like this:
XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-experimental-310/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules


4. Restart Bumblebee, logout.

Restart the bumblebeed daemon using the following command:

sudo service bumblebeed restart

Then log out and log back in and try it out:

optirun glxspheres

If it doesn't work, try to restart your system.

Note: if you're using Primus, you'll have to edit the /usr/bin/primusrun script to use "nvidia-experimental-310" instead of "nvidia-current".