14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME developer Bastien Nocera talks today, October 26, 2016, in a blog post, about the recent dual-GPU improvements brought by the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment release, and coming soon to Fedora 25 Linux.
If you own a recent laptop with dual graphics, which we usually call AMD or Nvidia hybrid configuration (on-board Intel HD GPU and dedicated Nvidia or AMD Radeon video cards), most probably you have a hard time running certain OpenGL applications, including games, with the dedicated GPU.
Fedora 25 Linux is currently in development and will launch next month, but if you're using the Beta with the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment (available in the Workstation Live CD), chances are dual-GPU support works a lot better than on other Linux-based operating systems, with both Nvidia Optimus and AMD Radeon hybrid graphics.
More dual-GPU improvements are coming in GNOME 3.24
To see if your AMD or Nvidia hybrid configuration works correctly, you should open the GNOME Control Center app and go to the "Details" settings panel, where you should notice that it lists the video cards you have in your laptop, or, in some cases, the graphics drivers used (see the screenshot attached for details).
Another cool new feature implemented in the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment and available to Fedora 25 users is the ability to run a certain application or game with the dedicated AMD or Nvidia graphics card using the right click context menu, making their lives a lot easier (again, see the gallery below for details).
"Behind those 2 features, we have a simple D-Bus service, which runs automatically on boot, and stays running to offer a single property (HasDualGpu) that system components can use to detect what UI to present. This requires the 'switcheroo' driver to work on the machine in question," said Bastien Nocera.
And it looks like things won't stop there, as the GNOME and Fedora developers are planning to improve this dual-GPU integration with things like support for apps to report if they prefer being run on the discrete or integrated GPU, Wayland dual-GPU support, hotpluggable graphics support, and support for NVidia's proprietary drivers, which will ship in GNOME 3.24 later this year, but will be backported to Fedora 25 Linux.
