I want to buy used laptop with rx6600m and r7 5800h
Does switch between discrete gpu and apu work on linux for amd gpus?
Maybe there are some pitfalls?
Linux does not do GPU switching the same way Windows does, if that’s what you’re asking. You won’t be able to just dynamically switch between video adapters.
As far as the quality of the AMD APU chips, totally fine. They are the best on the market, obviously. I have a Ryzen 7000 series with a 680M, and it “just works”, as well as playing every title I’ve ever thrown at it totally smoothly.
You won’t be able to just dynamically switch between video adapters.
You will if you use GNOME, at least. It uses
switcheroo
to provide an easy way to open apps with your discrete GPU through a right click menu.Hmm… are you sure about that?
$ DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD TURKS
DRI_PRIME=1
switches to the discrete GPU (or used to at least - I don’t have hybrid graphics anymore). I’d be surprised if that feature were removed…Most gaming laptops these days don’t do GPU switching anyways. They do render offloading, where the laptop display is permanently connected to the integrated GPU only. When you want to use the discrete GPU to play a game, it renders the game frames into a framebuffer on the discrete GPU and then copies the completed frame over PCIe into a framebuffer on the iGPU to then output it to the display. On Linux (Mesa), this feature is known as PRIME. If you have two GPUs and you do DRI_PRIME=1 <command>, it will run the command on the second GPU, at least for OpenGL applications. Vulkan seems to default to the discrete GPU no matter what. My laptop has an AMD iGPU and an NVIDIA dGPU and I’ve been testing the new NVK Mesa driver. Render offloading seems to work as expected. I would assume the AMD Mesa driver would work just as well for render offloading in a dual AMD situation.
Modern gaming laptops with Advanced Optimus are switching back to a mux for everything.
My friend has one (if I remember it it a Slimbook or Tuxedo laptop) and as far as he told me it is flawless (well almost). My next laptop will for sure be a KDE CPU+GPU one. I hear good things about the combo and if it is any similar to desktop AMD GPU support I will be happy.
I have an ancient HP laptop with an AMD CPU and vega graphics. It is legit one of my favorite systems to use Linux on. I have desktop towers with gpus that would run circles around it. But they’re Nvidia so that means I can’t use Wayland or the experience gets very unstable. This little laptop. It just cruises light fast and efficient. And though not up for modern gaming, still does respectable.
AMD gpus used to be very bad, but improved a lot in the last 2-3 years. I doubt you’ll have any issues these days.