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hirak99

Member

Registered: 2023-11-04

Posts: 10

How are Steam and Lutris defaulting to NVidia on a hybrid laptop?

After I updated to NVidia 545 yesterday, I found that the NVidia's display brightness control is broken.

So I switched to Hybrid as 100% display brightness is way too glaring.

And then I was very pleasantly surprised - I found all games, either launched from Steam or from Lutris, are using the NVidia GPU. There's no doubt about it, visually from framerates and rendering, but I also checked via nvtop to confirm.

This is the part I don't understand fully - and I am puzzled - hence the post.

How come are games using NVidia? Is there something smart at play here that I don't know about?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,559

Re: How are Steam and Lutris defaulting to NVidia on a hybrid laptop?

The common DirectX translation layers DXVK/VKD3D contain code to prefer and use a dedicated card in a hybrid setup by default. You'll likely notice differences when using native clients or stuff that uses OpenGL/Vulkan directly on Windows (good examples, Doom or Wolfenstein) in which case you'll want to install nvidia-prime so you can use prime-run for these use cases.