NVidia as Primary for gnome-shell (Optimus latptop)

Hi there.

I own an old Dell XPS laptop with an integrated GPU (intel) and a discrete GPU (nVidia). I moved to Silverblue recently, and I’m using Gnome with Wayland.

I recently bought a very big screen (4k) that need some horse power even for displaying the DE.

I tried MANY tutorials on the internet but still I can’t figure out how to completely by-pass the Intel GPU.

While using my desktop, this is the result of intel_gpu_top and nvidia-smi commands:

Intel:

NVidia:

As you can see intel GPU is still used for processing… stuff.

What I tried so far:

  • Adding GBM_BACKEND=nvidia-drm and __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia to /etc/environment
  • blacklisting i915 driver with the rpm-ostree kargs (i915 modeset to 0) but prevent the computer from booting
  • trying to put enable wayland in gdm.conf
  • other things I forgot in the meanwhile :slight_smile:

I really miss a way that allow the user to know which GPU is used by which app. I’m also very surprised to see that systemd process is used by the intel GPU.

Any thought about this?

Thanks!

if power consumption is not a concern, i would look in the “BIOS”. Pherhaps there is a toggle to disable the iGPU.

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