Want to use Nvidia GPU and integrated GPU at same time on desktop [F43 KDE]

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1

Hi, I’ve been running into a problem with certain games where my GPU gets overwhelmed to the point that Plasma crashes entirely, and Firefox is also unusable. It makes me wonder if there’s a way to use both the discrete (Nvidia) GPU and integrated (Intel) GPU at the same time, so that if the dGPU gets overwhelmed, the iGPU picks up the slack. In system monitor my iGPU always shows 0% usage.

If using both the GPUs isn’t possible with my setup, is there anything else I can do to address this?

It’s really annoying to try to play a game, and have it run decently well but make the rest of my computer unusable, so I can’t tab out or anything.

So far I’ve tried:

  • Using various flavors of Proton (including GE) and launch options for problem games
  • Switching between Software/Automatic for the Rendering Backend in Plasma Renderer settings
  • Lowering game settings
    • Worked for one game but had to be dramatically lower. Which sucks since I can run it at high settings performantly on Fedora, it just crashes *everything* else.

System info:
OS: Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) x86_64
Kernel: Linux 6.19.11-200.fc43.x86_64
DE: KDE Plasma 6.6.3
CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-12700K (20) @ 5.00 GHz
GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Lite Hash Rate [Discrete]
GPU 2: Intel UHD Graphics 770 @ 1.50 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: 5.90 GiB / 31.05 GiB
Swap: 136.00 KiB / 8.00 GiB (0%)
–
Nvidia Driver Version: 580.142 | CUDA Version: 13.0

2

This nvidia driver version has displayed some bugs on laptops using both iGPU and dGPU.

Rpmfusion has rolled back the version in their repos so it should be easy to downgrade using sudo dnf downgrade \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware and revert back to the 580.126.18 drivers. That should solve the issue for you.

3

Just tried your suggestion, didn’t seem to work. The output:

Updating and loading repositories:
 RPM Fusion for Fedora 43 - Nonfree - Updates                                             100% |   2.3 KiB/s |   5.6 KiB |  00m02s
 RPM Fusion for Fedora 43 - Nonfree - Steam                                               100% |   3.0 KiB/s |   5.6 KiB |  00m02s
 RPM Fusion for Fedora 43 - Nonfree - NVIDIA Driver                                       100% |   3.9 KiB/s |   6.1 KiB |  00m02s
 RPM Fusion for Fedora 43 - Free - Updates                                                100% |   2.8 KiB/s |   3.7 KiB |  00m01s
 Mullvad VPN                                                                              100% |   1.8 KiB/s |   1.5 KiB |  00m01s
 home:paul4us (Fedora_42)                                                                 100% |   2.0 KiB/s |   1.6 KiB |  00m01s
 Fedora 43 - x86_64 - Updates                                                             100% |  22.8 KiB/s |  24.9 KiB |  00m01s
Repositories loaded.
Failed to resolve the transaction:
The lowest available version of the "kmod-nvidia-6.19.10-200.fc43.x86_64.x86_64" package is already installed, cannot downgrade it.
The lowest available version of the "kmod-nvidia-6.19.11-200.fc43.x86_64.x86_64" package is already installed, cannot downgrade it.
The lowest available version of the "kmod-nvidia-6.19.9-200.fc43.x86_64.x86_64" package is already installed, cannot downgrade it.
The lowest available version of the "nvidia-query-resource-opengl.x86_64" package is already installed, cannot downgrade it.
The lowest available version of the "nvidia-query-resource-opengl-lib.x86_64" package is already installed, cannot downgrade it.
Problem 1: conflicting requests
  - cannot install both xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.95.05-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - cannot install both xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-updates and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - cannot install both xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - installed package kmod-nvidia-6.19.10-200.fc43.x86_64-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 requires nvidia-kmod-common >= 3:580.142, but none of the providers can be installed
  - problem with installed package
 Problem 2: conflicting requests
  - package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power-3:580.95.05-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree requires xorg-x11-drv-nvidia(x86-64) = 3:580.95.05, but none of the providers can be installed
  - package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-updates requires xorg-x11-drv-nvidia(x86-64) = 3:580.126.18, but none of the providers can be installed
  - package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver requires xorg-x11-drv-nvidia(x86-64) = 3:580.126.18, but none of the providers can be installed
  - cannot install both xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.95.05-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - cannot install both xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-updates and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - cannot install both xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - installed package kmod-nvidia-6.19.11-200.fc43.x86_64-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 requires nvidia-kmod-common >= 3:580.142, but none of the providers can be installed
  - problem with installed package
 Problem 3: conflicting requests
  - cannot install both nvidia-modprobe-3:580.95.05-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree and nvidia-modprobe-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - cannot install both nvidia-modprobe-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-updates and nvidia-modprobe-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - cannot install both nvidia-modprobe-3:580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64 from rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver and nvidia-modprobe-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 from @System
  - installed package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 requires nvidia-modprobe(x86-64) = 3:580.142, but none of the providers can be installed
  - installed package kmod-nvidia-6.19.9-200.fc43.x86_64-3:580.142-1.fc43.x86_64 requires nvidia-kmod-common >= 3:580.142, but none of the providers can be installed
  - problem with installed package
You can try to add to command line:
  --skip-broken to skip uninstallable packages
4

I looked it up since yours didn’t work and it seems that you just missed a flag:
sudo dnf downgrade \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware --allowerasing

With this I was able to downgrade my drivers to the version you mentioned. However, this did not fix my issue. I still am not seeing any usage from my iGPU, even when running a game that pushes the dGPU to “150%” in SysMonitor (or 99% on Steam’s performance overlay).

I wonder if it just isn’t possible to use both unless you have a specific setup, like a laptop with Nvidia Optimus support?

5

A game cannot use both iGPU + Discrete GPU unless it is capable of “multi-gpu“ . This is like the old SLI/Crossfire days, when we could use 2 GPU’s but same gen + vendor.

I would venture to say you could be experienceing some other issues. Maybe tone down the graphical settings like bloom or other effects.

6

Some users have reported glitches when both iGPU and dGPU were enabled and the system attempted to use both at the same time.

I fail to understand why you would expect the system to use both GPUs at the same time since both definitely have different performance. The iGPU (integrated into the CPU) also uses CPU time & power as well as system RAM for its performance. Expecting to use the iGPU when the system has selected the dGPU for the task is like expecting to drive a car while the brakes are engaged.

7

Also, this looks like it’s a desktop system, and (unlike laptops) that means generally there is no multiplexing of outputs betwen iGPU and dGPU.

i.e. if you plug a display into your motherboard video port, it’s driven by the iGPU only; if you plug a display into your dGPU’s video port, then it’s driven by the dGPU only.

8

Yeah I probably just had the wrong idea of what’s even possible. I wasn’t quite expecting the games to use both GPUs, but I was (naively) hoping that my DE could use the iGPU or something to not crash while the games run on the dGPU.

But Plasma Renderer automatically switching to software rendering and stuff like that never seemed to improve things. I’m probably out of options save for some that I’d rather not go for, i.e. lowering the game’s graphical settings by a lot. Sorry for the somewhat stupid question(s).

9

Noticing that you have a 8 GB GPU, depending on the game you’re playing, your issue may be related to the GPU running out of VRAM. Linux is historically quite awful at handling VRAM pressure. I suggest tracking VRAM utilization to confirm if this is what’s happening in your case, and if it is, you might be able to mitigate it by adjusting game settings to use lower quality textures…

On the AMD side, a fix for this was recently implemented: Fixing AMDGPU's VRAM management for low-end GPUs | pixelcluster's GPU blog
But unfortunately it’s unknown when NVIDIA may get similar capability to resolve this fundamental performance flaw.