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Comment by Sangeppato | Hacker News Reader

The dual GPU is a pain in the butt since Nvidia still doesn't support Optimus on Linux (and probably never will).

Have you tried 19.10 or 20.04? Before that I had a lot of issues with my Dell XPS 9560 because of optimus, but it got a lot better in those versions. YMMV but it actually worked out of the box with nary a hint of manual configuration when I installed 20.04 recently.

Edit: should note, when I say work I mean you can switch between GPUs/launch an app on the dedicated GPU with ease.

I've tried 19.10 and Arch Linux and the only option still was to statically choose only one GPU and reboot. How does the offloading work now? I haven't heard anything about it

19.10 added the "NVIDIA On-Demand" profile in Nvidia Settings. It needs the driver version 435 or newer.

It works okay, but you have to launch processes with a specific set of env variables to use the Nvidia card.

That is not true anymore. With 20.04 it supports hybrid graphics just fine. The only issue I had was sharing cuda and OpenGL context since GL ran on the Intel card. This should not be a concern for most people I assume.

Can you run everything on the iGPU and only activate the Nvidia GPU to do the render offloading on single apps? If you can, I should try 20.04 on a laptop

Yes exactly. This way you have all the GPU memory available for accelerated apps. Not sure if it works for all use cases but worked for me.

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