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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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It's a desktop.
So desktops don't work like laptops in this sense.
On a laptop, the bus for the video output ports can be connected to one or both GPUs, and the software does the graphics switching or offloading.
On a desktop, there is no consolidated bus between the PCIe card and the onboard graphics, so you can't switch between which GPU is rendering what on hardware alone. It's the whole display that is rendered on the device you're plugged into.
Windows does have some sort of offloading utility that allows for this i believe, but I've never used it so don't know how well it works.
On Linux, your display server (X or Wayland) needs to address one GPU at a time to render things.
You can totally use both GPUs with multiple monitors, but I think that's defeating the purpose you have in mind.
What is https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME then?
On Prime you can make your iGPU the primary (display connected to motherboard), and offload some rendering to the dGPU with some caveats. It was only working on Xorg for awhile, but maybe it works better under Wayland now. Couldn't tell you.