30
How to make use of dGPU and iGPU?
(piefed.jeena.net)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
30 points (91.7% liked)
Linux
50249 readers
921 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
@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.