Second Monitor - integrated gpu or dedicated gpu

[Scott_Arm]

Any of you have experience using an integrated gpu for your secondary monitor? I think any kind of stuttering issues with using the second monitor on your dedicated gpu are supposed to be fixed, but I don't know. Wondering if I use the integrated gpu would be worth trying and if there are any issues I might encounter that I might not expect. For instance, I don't know if the onboard graphics on my motherboard has any video codec support, so if I have a video on my second display would it use my cpu?

This is all it says for the onboard graphics:

Integrated Graphics Processor with AMD Radeon™ Graphics support+ASMedia USB4® Controller:
- 2 x USB4® USB Type-C® ports, supporting USB4 and DisplayPort video outputs and a maximum resolution of 3840x2160@240 Hz

* Support for DisplayPort 1.4 version and HDR.


Integrated Graphics Processor with AMD Radeon™ Graphics support:
- 1 x HDMI port, supporting a maximum resolution of 4096x2160@60 Hz

* Support for HDMI 2.1 version, HDCP 2.3, and HDR.
** Support native HDMI 2.1 TMDS compatible ports.


- 1 x front HDMI port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920x1080@30 Hz

* Support for HDMI 1.4 version


(Graphics specifications may vary depending on CPU support.)
Support for up to quad-display at the same time

 

[homerdog]

Any of you have experience using an integrated gpu for your secondary monitor? I think any kind of stuttering issues with using the second monitor on your dedicated gpu are supposed to be fixed, but I don't know. Wondering if I use the integrated gpu would be worth trying and if there are any issues I might encounter that I might not expect. For instance, I don't know if the onboard graphics on my motherboard has any video codec support, so if I have a video on my second display would it use my cpu?

This is all it says for the onboard graphics:

NVIDIA RTX HDR doesn't work if there are multiple monitors connected to the GPU. At least that used to be the case. I heard it may be fixed now. But because of that I plugged my 2nd monitor into the mobo (Z790/13600K). I couldn't notice any difference at all, and RTX HDR did start working after I did that.

P.S. Somehow I can output games that render using the 4070 to the IGP connected 2nd monitor. Again, no perceptible difference in quality or performance.

 

[pcchen]

I did that before, also for the RTX HDR thing, but once it supports multi-monitor setups properly I switched back to use only the dedicated GPU, because I think it's a good idea to reduce the extra power the integrated GPU might need.
A few days ago I did try to go back to connect my 2nd monitor on the integrated GPU again, but then I found that some games seems to have more microstutters, and low 1% FPS sometimes become very low more frequently, so I switched back to dedicated GPU only setup. (I'm using Windows 11 24H2)

There are still some problems with a multi-monitor setup though. Other than the RTX HDR thing, another reason to use the integrated GPU is that I sometimes play YouTube videos on my 2nd monitor while playing games, but it used to cause weird problems, notably YouTube sometimes start buffering, like the internet is not fast enough, and eventually switched to the lowest resolution (360p) video. After searching on the internet for possible solutions I found out that turning off the "hardware accelerated GPU scheduling" helps.

 

[Cyan]

the mix of iGPUs and a dGPU has always been my favourite thing about laptops, or even desktop CPUs, to combine the iGPU with a dGPU. There might be uses to that, and tbh, having an Intel A770 which consumes 34W in idle mode I'd be grateful to have an iGPU on my mobo or integrated in the CPU to use the desktop while reserving the A770 for gaming.

Maybe in the future we are going to see some variation of this, like GPUs having a dedicated chip for FG or whatever.