External monitors automatically over dedicated graphics?

Ask Fedora
1

Hi there
I try to complete my setup with my notebook and two external monitors.
I have a nvidia quadro T1000 in my notebook, hope this is sufficient for 2 monitors… (4K)
i could only use 1 if neccesary.

what i need, is that, when my second / third monitor is plugged in, it should automatically run over the dedicated graphics card and not onboard. so the monitors should be rendered over the nvidia card.
the problem is, that i plug in and out the monitors daily and use my notebook also on other places with no external monitor.

default configuration on fedora 41 (plasma) with xorg / x11 is the following; default goes to onboard graphics and i think over the nouveau driver. i have registered my own command (graphics-run) to call the dedicated graphics when i need it. this is better for me, since i have only 4GB memory on the GPU and sometimes i need those. automatically using GPU all the time would cost approximately 40-60% of my GPU power resp. memory. so idont really want to use dedicated GPU as default.

any good ideas for automating this, so that my monitors are rendered over dedicated GPU, ideally without doing anything when plugging in?

the main problem is, that my onboard graphic is not able to render 2x4K Monitors and the notebooks own 4K display, what is kind of normal, i think…

thanks for your helt

kind regards

2

You could use xrandr for that I think, though I can’t test it myself.
Arch wiki has instructions that should be fairly generic.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Multihead

Unless I misunderstand you and you want to switch all rendering to discrete on connecting the displays, for which you’d use udev rules to switch.

Hope this helps

3

thanks a lot

i dont think its necessary to switch the complete rendering to dedicated when plugging in the monitor. its just important that stuff which is on one of the monitors goes over dedicated so that my onboard gpu is not busted.