I confirm the issue on Ubuntu 18.04 base with kernel 4.15.0-88, NVidia
drivers 435.21 and 440.59 make no difference in the behavior. After
'prime-select intel' the nvidia driver is not loaded at all and intel
graphcs are active, but according to PowerTop the NVIDIA chip still
consumes the power. Acer laptop, NVidia 1050 Ti, Intel i5-7300HQ.

(TLDR: see SOLUTION at the end of the comment!)

Good thing is: as reported in comment #61 above by Vincente, command
from PowerTop Tunables tab (Runtime PM for PCI device NVIDIA Corporation
GP107M) actually helps to power off the NVidia chip and power
consumption goes down by a ~10W. Unfortunately, that does not persist
after system restart.

After checking the relevant NVidia driver manual 
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/440.59/README/dynamicpowermanagement.html
 I have found that same command to enable the runtime power management which 
PowerTop uses:
 echo auto > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:01\:00.0/power/control
or a variant with proper privileges:
 sudo sh -c 'echo auto > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/control'
That does the trick as well, so PowerTop is not needed to enable it.

GREAT THING AND THE SOLUTION: after reading the 'Automated Setup'
section in the nvidia manual above, I have found a way to automate that.
No bbswitch, no tlp tools, no extra scripts/services! Just create a file
named 80-nvidia-poweroff.rules in /lib/udev/rules.d/ directory with the
following content:

# Enable runtime PM for NVIDIA VGA/3D controller devices by default (if the 
driver is not / will not be bound)
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", 
ATTR{class}=="0x030000", DRIVER=="", TEST=="power/control", 
ATTR{power/control}="auto"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", 
ATTR{class}=="0x030200", DRIVER=="", TEST=="power/control", 
ATTR{power/control}="auto"

Save and reboot the system. Done! The nvidia chip will be in power off
mode already when you open the PowerTop to check that. And that will
work only when the intel is selected as an active controller by prime-
select tool, so should be safe when nvidia is set as active instead.

P.S. I wish this to be done automatically when installing the nvidia
driver... No magic for installer to create that file.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1765363

Title:
  prime-select intel is not powering off the nvidia card

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