Optimus vs NVIDIA GPU Only - Advanced Optimus and dGPU Settings Explained

gaming laptops have two graphics cards on board one is the powerful one for gaming the dedicated GPU or dgpu for short and the other is the low power one built into the CPU itself called the integrated GPU or I GPU for short for the sake of bachy Life the IG GPU is the one that actually runs your display basically anytime that you aren't gaming and the dgpu is literally turned off when you fire up a game though the dgpu takes over and renders your game as fast as it can the problem with having two graphics cards connected to One display is a bit of a tricky one to solve though Nvidia came up with Optimus over a decade ago to do just that basically the dgpu video signal was rooted through the igpu and then onto the display Optimus would basically control which of the gpus was the one doing that rendering the problem with that design is that it's a massive bottle neck it adds latency since the game's frames need to pass through the igpu before being displayed and can sometimes even limit outright performance too that obviously isn't ideal and the problem there is that even if you go into the device manager and disable the igpu Well it can't be fully disabled as the dgpu still needs to pass its frames through it happily laptop manufacturers started using a ready-made solution a Muk switch that's mux as in multiplexer you can think of it like physically moving a HDMI cable from the motherboard board io on a desktop to your actual graphics card and back can every time you launch or exit a game that switches between the two gpus and thanks to Nvidia embracing that design with the newer Advanced Optimus Tech well it's a pretty seamless switch you really don't notice it changing over at all and now that you get all of the benefits of you know not having an igpu or not having a dgpu because the two are no longer connected to each other and can be turned off in independently so what's this video about then well Nvidia actually gives you an extra setting here under manage display mode in the Nvidia control panel you'll find three choices automatic Optimus and Nvidia GPU only technically speaking automatic should really be called Optimus and Optimus should really be called igpu only but we're really only looking at the top and bottom options here so ignore the one in the middle the top one is the standard Optimus well Advanced Optimus mode and the bottom just disables the igpu I'll start off by saying that for most people in most situations leaving this on automatic makes the most sense for all intents and purposes that is the best option for most people but if you're an enthusiast and want the best experience and don't mind a few tweaks and drawbacks well then the other mode might be for you there are a couple of reasons why you might want to switch to the Nvidia GPU only mode the first is freeing up some power for your CPU now this isn't really a big deal as gaming doesn't tend to be a you know really push the CPU to anywhere near its power limits but it's the same principle for buying a KF desktop CPU from Intel it means you have a touch more power on hand to give to the CPU or thanks to Dynamic boost maybe even to the GPU which actually might maybe give you a tiny tiny little bit more performance but let's be real that is more of a paper benefit than anything now the the other more useful reason is that Optimus sometimes gets which GPU to use use wrong I've booted up games and it runs horribly and then I switched to the dgpu mode only mode and hey Presto it's running great this can mean significantly less performance in games often randomly as sometimes it does pick the right GPU but when it doesn't it's a massive pain it can also mean worse latency I found on the I think xmg Pro 15 that with optim enabled I was getting over 10 milliseconds of on display latency but with Nvidia GPU only mode that dropped to just 3 milliseconds literally cut by almost 4X that's a pretty big incentive to use the dgpu mode right well yes but there are some costs specifically battery life the very reason laptops have two gpus is because one is much much more efficient than the other and so disabling the efficient one is going to cost you in battery life you can of course just manually switch to the dgpu mode for you know when you launch a game and then switch back once you've closed it but having to remember to do that would be pretty annoying and worse as the aorus 16x demonstrated so nicely for us uh in the full video you can check out the cards with their automated version of exactly that when you switch between Optimus and dgpu modes it often hangs the whole system for 5 to 10 seconds both ways launch a game Cool your system is Frozen for a full 10 seconds while it does that so switch over yeah you close the game wonderful it's locked up for a while it gets pretty annoying so unless you are having issues with your games performing purly on your gaming laptop personally I would just leave it on automatic if you want to spend the time to get the best possible experience or are having issues where games are suddenly running like trash maybe give Nvidia GPU only mode go of course with that said I would actually love to hear your experiences with Optimus and advanced Optimus uh in the description if you have any of those weird edge cases where you seem to find it especially regularly gets it wrong let me know what those edge cases are in the comments um also if you want to see more videos like this one you can hit the Subscribe button turn on the Bell notification icon and if you want to see more videos that are already up including the review for this ARS 16x I'll leave it on the cards that will pop up in a second if you want to be able to test stuff like this like the latency like response times or even peripherals like mice and keyboards I make my very own Hardware that I sell over at osr t.com feel free to go have a look it's all open open source as well which is quite nice and I make it right here at home uh otherwise thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this we'll see you on the next video

Channel: TechteamGB

Views: 2,836

Keywords: techteamgb, Tech teamGB, GB, tech, Tech team GB, mux switch, advanced optimus, gaming laptop, nvidia advanced optimus, nvidia graphics, nvidia optimus, how to turn off optimus on laptop, improve game performance, mux switch laptop, intel hd graphics, optimus disabled, mux switch vs no mux, set nvidia as default graphics card, mux switch explained, mux switch vs advanced optimus, mux switch on and off, advanced optimus vs mux switch, how to enable advanced optimus

Id: f-ckYqJ17og

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024