nvidia-gpu-off VS nvidia-legacy

I'm decently sure it doesn't turn off completely in Windows either. There are ways to completely disable it, but I'd say it's not worth the effort as it only saves a tiny amount of power. If you still insist on manually disabling it, check out this repo.

Already tried this https://github.com/bayasdev/nvidia-gpu-off without success.

> How did you "power down" your nvidia card?

First I made sure X was working the way I wanted with Intel graphics. There are a handful of ways to do hybrid graphics on Linux, depending on what you want to be able to do, and how old your hardware is. The Arch wiki has some pretty good guides [1] that are helpful even if you're using a different system.

bbswitch seems to work on my system, and the interface is really simple [2]. But there's also this page on the acpi-call thing [3], which suggests that bbswitch is old and unmaintained and that newer systems do something different. From a quick scan, it looks like the Arch wiki also mentions this approach.

As far as drivers go, I know everyone likes to dump on Nvidia for their closed source mess, but in every system I've used with Nvidia hardware (desktops and laptops), I've found that the Nvidia drivers have universally been more reliable than nouveau, so that's what I use.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/hybrid_graphics (poke around in "Related Articles" too)

[2] https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch#turn-the-card-...

[3] https://github.com/geminis3/nvidia-gpu-off

Well then, there's this guide I know that might help you.

Ok so i found a way, a pretty easy one indeed, to do it. You have to install nvidia drivers. You could say that it easy, and you would be wrong. It needs an old nvidia version that is not supported. The graphic card is an nvidia gt 330M which means you need nvidia driver 340.x version. But that version, if you try to install from nvidia page, doesn't work with linux kernel higher than 4.4. So i found this https://github.com/MeowIce/nvidia-legacy . This repository has a version of that nvidia driver with support for 5.10+ kernel. So you just have to install the .run and then use nvidia-smi -i 0000:xx:00.0 -pm 0 where xx is your nvidia card pci ID (you can find it with lspci | grep NVIDIA. After that you will have your graphic card turned off.

Boot with nouveau and then download the 340.108 branch from here (you’ll need some dev tools and kernel-headers/source installed), build yourself the driver and reboot.

I really wish nouveau were in a better state. I have a positively ancient laptop with a 8600M nvidia chipset that just will not reliably operate with the nouveau driver.

Instead, I have to use https://github.com/MeowIce/nvidia-legacy to patch and install the proprietary drivers.