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How to make use of dGPU and iGPU?
(piefed.jeena.net)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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I'm going to assume that it is possible to put both the dedicated and integrated GPUs to work, though I've never seen this kind of setup.
This is likely not something you want to actually do.
The integrated GPU in your processor is not an additional bit of computing power your computer is not using, but special software that can use your processor to put out graphics if a dedicated GPU is missing. It is extremely inferior at processing graphics compared to the real dedicated GPU, and if you were running firefox to watch (Not decode) youtube, you would very likely see things like screen tearing as the processor struggled to keep up.
If you wanted to do this just to see the outcome for yourself, you could switch your displayport cable to your monitor to connect to your motherboard instead of your GPU to get an idea of how rough this would be. If you wanted to continue after seeing this, I believe you would need to connect a 2nd monitor in order to use both the dedicated and integrated GPUs.
This is straight up wrong. You are confusing GPUs with display adapters.
iGPUs are an actual on-die GPU, consiting of their own hardware, present on the die in addition to the CPU.
They can game. They can hardware decode and encode media, etc. They are full GPUs. Some are even quite powerful, though usually you'll find them to be designed for everyday use and only light gaming.
The GPU in every recent game console is technically an iGPU, same goes for phones, and the Steamdeck.
They do not "translate" GPU instructions into running on the CPU cores.
That's software rendering, and is what CPUs do when there isn't an iGPU at all. (Though they'll still need a display adapter, which a GPU can act as. But a display adapter doesn't need to be a full on GPU. And iGPUs aren't just display adapters.)
TIL. Thank you
@jeena @Pogogunner
Every single laptop with a dGPU does that, as I'm typing this now only Minecraft is using the dGPU while everything else is on the iGPU. Everything is fully performant (including YT videos), and it greatly increases battery life.
I've never owned a laptop with a GPU, very interesting how that works.
Is it something works out of the box, or do you have to manually set it up?
@Pogogunner At least on Debian based distros, it's all part of the driver installation.
As for how it works at the hardware/kernel level the iGPU take some of system RAM to use as VRAM, so all the kernel has to do is give the dGPU a DMA buffer into that. The final piece is for the iGPU driver to send a synchronisation signal to the dGPU when it's ready to receive the (partial-)frame.
Yeah, not really, I think the iGPU is still very preformant, especially it has bread video de and encoding capabilities. It's probably more powerful than my dell XPS 13 laptop iGPU which let's me connect a external 4k monitor and run games and video editing smoothly with some Lowe settings.