this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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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.
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Linux does not do GPU switching the same way Windows does, if that's what you're asking. You won't be able to just dynamically switch between video adapters.
As far as the quality of the AMD APU chips, totally fine. They are the best on the market, obviously. I have a Ryzen 7000 series with a 680M, and it "just works", as well as playing every title I've ever thrown at it totally smoothly.
Most gaming laptops these days don't do GPU switching anyways. They do render offloading, where the laptop display is permanently connected to the integrated GPU only. When you want to use the discrete GPU to play a game, it renders the game frames into a framebuffer on the discrete GPU and then copies the completed frame over PCIe into a framebuffer on the iGPU to then output it to the display. On Linux (Mesa), this feature is known as PRIME. If you have two GPUs and you do DRI_PRIME=1 , it will run the command on the second GPU, at least for OpenGL applications. Vulkan seems to default to the discrete GPU no matter what. My laptop has an AMD iGPU and an NVIDIA dGPU and I've been testing the new NVK Mesa driver. Render offloading seems to work as expected. I would assume the AMD Mesa driver would work just as well for render offloading in a dual AMD situation.
Out of curiosity, how does this work with an external display? Does your HDMI/DisplayPort out go via the dGPU, or is it still done in the same way?
Most of the laptops I've seen the external port is connected to the dGPU.