I tried bumblebee again recently, and it works shockingly well now. I have a thinkpad T530 from 2013 with an NVS5400m.
There is some strange issue with some games where they don't get full performance from the dGPU, but more than the iGPU. I have to use optirun to get full performance.
It also has problems when the computer wakes from sleep. For whatever reason, hardware video decoding doesn't work after entering standby. Makes steam in home streaming crash on the client, but flipping to software decoding usually works fine.
The important part is that battery life is almost as good with bumblebee as it is with the dGPU turned off. No more fucking with Prime or rebooting into BIOS to turn the GPU back on.
There is some strange issue with some games where they don't get full performance from the dGPU, but more than the iGPU. I have to use optirun to get full performance.
It also has problems when the computer wakes from sleep. For whatever reason, hardware video decoding doesn't work after entering standby. Makes steam in home streaming crash on the client, but flipping to software decoding usually works fine.
The important part is that battery life is almost as good with bumblebee as it is with the dGPU turned off. No more fucking with Prime or rebooting into BIOS to turn the GPU back on.