Recent laptops mostly come with hybrid-graphics system (two GPUs in one machine: an integrated GPU and a discrete GPU). It was first designed to control power consumption in laptops. By default, the operating system will use the integrated GPU which is less power consumption. Only when heavy activities (gaming, graphic rendering, GPU computing, etc) are performed, then operating system will move the workload to the discrete GPU.
For laptop with NVIDIA GPU, there is NVIDIA Optimus Technology for auto-switching between integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Unfortunately, NVIDIA support for this technology in Linux is not as good as in Windows. Since discrete GPU is a secondary card, installing the driver for NVIDIA GPU is not easy and may cause problem with the display manager in Linux. Read More …