this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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How to make use of dGPU and iGPU? (piefed.jeena.net)
submitted 1 week ago by jeena@piefed.jeena.net to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm on Arch (btw.) and I have a Intel i5-14600K CPU with a iGPU (UHD Graphics 770) (GPU 1) in it and a dGPU from Nvidia, the RTX 3060 (GPU 0). I have one monitor connected to the 3060 via display port 1.4.

I can see both GPUs in GNOME Mission Center, but hte iGPU has always Clock Speed 0 and Utilization 0. So anything which is done on the GPU is done on the 3060.

I want to seperate what is done on the iGPU and what is done on the 3060:

dGPU (RTX 3060):

  1. Video editing
  2. video transcoding
  3. AI stuff (ollama)
  4. Machine learning
  5. Blender
  6. Steam games

iGPU (intel):

  1. Firefox (especially YouTube video decoding, it has hw acceleration for that)
  2. Chrome
  3. Libre Office
  4. GNOME
  5. etc.

I wonder if this or at least parts of it is possible. I need the whole 12 GB VRAM on the 3060 for ollama, and the iGPU is just sitting there doing nothing. Is there a way to distribute the work? Do I need two screens for that or something?

It might also be that I'm misunderstanding how the whole thing works or over estimating Linuxes capabilities.

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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

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.