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There are a bazillion questions all over the internet, and in all cases the answer seems to be "simply open NVIDIA settings" which is quite pointless if you have an AMD or Intel Arc GPU.

Is there a general way to do this? Do you need to blacklist the driver for integrated graphics? Do you manually need to write xorg config files? Is there some other tool or setting that can do this?

So far I've found some references about PRIME offloading which seems irrelevant since my display is connected to the discrete graphics. And there is a switcheroo thing that seems to allow launching specific apps on the discrete graphics as a one-time action.

In my case browsers and Element applications flicker on the integrated GPU so I want to use the dedicated graphics. In my case I have AMD integrated graphics and an Intel ARC GPU.

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    Disable integrated graphics in the BIOS.
    – zomega
    Commented Apr 2, 2023 at 16:39
  • My BIOS has a setting for "primary video device" which I changed from IGFX to PCIE but it seems to revert back automatically and Gnome still lists AMD graphics in settings -> about
    – Pepijn
    Commented Apr 3, 2023 at 17:34
  • You have to install the Intel Arc graphics driver first. Which OS do you have?
    – zomega
    Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 6:55
  • Ubuntu, Arch, and Windows haha I can actually play games on the card just fine. After updating my bios I have the option to disable the integrated graphics entirely but that left the system unable to boot so that was a fun evening
    – Pepijn
    Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 12:11
  • On this post somebody explains how he got Intel Arc working under Ubuntu bioslevel.com/articles/2022/…
    – zomega
    Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 12:21

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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So I did a bunch of asking around and digging around and experimenting.

This post provided a bunch of options which were all ultimately unhelpful but might solve someone else's problem: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1062967/ubuntu-18-04-not-working-with-intel-integrated-graphics

zomega in the comments suggested disabling the integrated graphics card in the bios. This sounded like a good idea, but once I did that my system wouldn't boot with the motherboard "vga problem" LED burning. So I spent the evening upgrading and resetting the bios without any progress.

The first thing that actually worked was to put DRI_PRIME=1 in /etc/environment which does indeed start everything on the dedicated graphics card. Unfortunately this caused more problems than it solved, with several other apps refusing to start or completely glitching out.

For me the winning solution came from https://askubuntu.com/a/1235310/211551 which suggests adding PrefersNonDefaultGPU=true to the .desktop file of the apps of interest in /usr/share/applications/. This allows me to only run problematic apps on the dedicated GPU, in my case Firefox and Electron apps.

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  • Great you got it running. When you disable integrated graphics in the BIOS you have to connect the monitor to your graphics card (not to the mainboard). It's also possible you see bootup messages and the BIOS screen only one one of the connectors (if your graphics card got multiple).
    – zomega
    Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 12:30
  • Yes I have the monitor connected on the dedicated card. It just straight up doesn't pass POST with integrated graphics disabled.
    – Pepijn
    Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 13:08

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