While the front-end to Optimus may be less than optimal, it's quite well done internally. I came across it when I hooked an external GPU to my laptop. This is

While the front-end to Optimus may be less than optimal, it's quite well done internally. I came across it when I hooked an external GPU to my laptop. This is possible via ExpressCard with a passive (mechanical) adapter, and it even hot-plugs in Windows and installs the correct driver out of the box. It does require a reboot the first time, but other than that it's smooth. What Optimus does is texture compression before textures are sent over the single PCI express 2.0 lane to the GPU. It can also enable my external GPU to render back into the internal notebook display. I'm baffled by how easy this is to set up and how flawlessly it works, and honestly I am surprised that none of the commercial solutions has ever succeeded. ExpressCard even supports a USB 2.0 port, so I can plug my keyboard and mouse to the adapter, which then effectively works as a docking station (except for power).