Integrated GPU and GeForce love?

Sumea · April 22, 2018

Hey hey people. I am new here.

Lately I got thinking a little with my rig, having intel integrated graphics on my CPU and a GeForce GTX1060 - Not the newest, latest or greatest rig but one I game and use with two (or sometimes with my TV, three) monitors. Some games I like to keep a browser open on my second screen in pivot - quite a lot.

I do know there is detrimental effect with this. modern Web rendering, youtube and all benefit from GPU accelerated rendering as does windows itself, this of course lowers framerates by a small margin, but other thing I noticed now using a 144hz monitor that frame pacing seems to go little whack if I do this with some games, especially if the game is running in windowed mode. I have not used any fancy meters nor can I tell that my "own feelings" are the best but it is mostly like the game feel drops even though FPS counters say it's still around 100 or more.

One additional problem I noticed with some games in windowed mode was that some windows effects also just TANK some games, others just slightly bother; like playing a non-steam game and getting a steam message so just the GPU accelerated flashing orange notifier in taskbar starts to tank the game unless I alt tab and click the notification flash away.

This all is prelude: You can ignore the above if you so like.

Question is; having Intel graphics on my CPU could I utilize it's iGPU for my windows/browser rendering leaving my 1060 for just the hard game rendering and CUDA tasks? What options could one have.

I am currently for the baseline going with 4790K i7 on Asus Maximus VII HERO motherboard and 16 gigs of RAM (these are something I got for cheaper when friend upgraded) as well as mentioned MSI GTX1060 6GB card.

If this is impossible, just tips and tricks of multimonitors, gaming AND YOU in general are welcome too.

Thanks in advance.

Mick Naughty · April 22, 2018

Plug a monitor or monitors into the mobo and find out.

I dont play windowed as that in itself is an issue that isn’t worth it.

Sumea · April 25, 2018

On 22.4.2018 at 3:10 PM, Mick Naughty said:

Plug a monitor or monitors into the mobo and find out.

I dont play windowed as that in itself is an issue that isn’t worth it.

So after few days of testing stuff and trying a lot of things and looking into things myself the best I could, and in case someone somewhere in the world googles and finds this thread, even how unlikely:

Some things I did try:

Enable multi monitor dual GPU, plug in my 2nd monitor to motherboard, both GPU's are now active in windows achieved.

Does the intel GPU do anything now? No, not as is not even sure windows is being accelerated by it and while all Intel graphic center options become enabled as the device (of Intel GPU) it does not seem to do anything but draw the 2nd screen, all 3D acceleration still is done by the one and only John Cena. GTX 1060.

Check two: Browsers and manually swapping the GPU. Short answer "ha ha ha no", long answer "Yes I can see the two GPU's and I can tell you which one is active and I by all means should be able to swap which GPU to accelerate with, even if with a console command but... not gonna" - Chrome engine/webkit based browsers (all browsers these days) seem to show very similar X://gpu (replace X with name of your browser) and... All I can is 'mire the fact that I have two GPU's and do nothing about it.

Next stop: go to the land how laptops do it. How? I dunno... Some people tell their laptop's nvidia control panel lets them choose and I can find such screenshots where the GPU can be assigned in Nvidia control panel. Question is, how?

Well answer is optimus I already knew after few minutes since my friend has a laptop with optimus (and he wants to nuke it to the ground) - but for my needs it would suffice as I want to force the GPU per app basis which optimus is apparently able to do.

So skip ahead some googling and a tutorial on how to modify desktop GPU Nvidia driver installer to enable optimus. Pain, unsigned mode and at least 2 reinstallations of the GPU drivers later: Nah. Even if Optimus IS enabled now, the control panel sure as heck doesn't have what I want; that illustrious switch in per app options for my GPU choice.

After, multiple, complete wipe and reinstallation of modified unsigned GPU drivers that windows 8.1 does not like I gave up, and made one last clean install of unmodified GPU drivers.

So after just about whole day wasted on every technological aspect going against my wish I gave up.

I also came up with way more ghetto yet more or less same kind of solution by patching a 3.5mm cable from my line in to my tablet, smacking my shield tablet on something that keeps it angled and upright, and put listen on in the line input and viola, I have youtube playing from shield tablet from whichever sound device I am using on my PC, with individual volume control and no additional stress on my GPU. Works for Me™

Things left unexplored:

Windows 10, or digging deeper into browser consoles. Second one is just that, finding out if undocumented a command exists for enforcing the GPU. Windows 10 on other hand seems to have optimus-like feature built in, where a different GPU can be chosen for different applications and even enforced by user manually. This feature though is very likely limited to laptops and laptop components only, very hard/impossible to enable in a desktop (likely) and even then kinda painful way to control this all.

So that is my novel on "How I tried to double my GPU life and learned to love (just) the one"

A 3.5mm jack, extra line in and any smart device you can think of using is much easier than wasting more time on trying to do things "the cool way" - but at least I darn tried.