i don't play videogames and i don't do ai/ml, video editing or whatever.
i spend most of my time in firefox and in terminals. i do use virtual machines quite a lot to test stuff around, so high cores count and high memory would be a plus for me.
but an nvidia gpu is a deal breaker for me. I just don't want it. I don't need it, i don't use it, it just makes the whole thing less usable. and it draws a lot power that i'd prefer using otherwise.
the intel integrated gpu is not only sufficient for me, i actually WANT it. it just works under gnu/linux and i don't have to mess with drivers.
I cannot stress enough how much i hate having to deal with proprietary drivers.
and last time i played a videogame, it was openarena, and it ran beautifully on the intel hd 600 my work laptop had (dell latitude 7390, great little machine).
edit: regarding amd gpus... i'm not sure. i've been told they work with open source drivers, but still it's a power usage i would happily avoid.
I mean, in a laptop, you dont use the dGPU on battery unless its for compute, period. It should just be sitting there turned off (which indeed means you dont want it). But if its sucking any power, thats a bug.
That being said, Firefox and Chromium use the integrated GPU more than you think, and they feel faster with a stronger IGP. Just try disabling some of the gpu acceleration and see how it feels.
On my nvidia thinkpad I have had to completely disable the integrated GPU in bios and use discrete only due to constant bugs with hybrid graphics on Linux. This means my battery life is less than two hours.
I haven't noticed any difference between an i5-8500 with its integrated GPU and my gaming PC with an RX5000 something. Both running latest windows and edge.
They actually feel similar to Firefox running on Linux on an i5-6500's IGP.
It probably depends on the websites you visit. The only thing better on the newer ones is video decoding for YouTube or the like. I usually actively avoid websites with animations and other similar stuff as I find them very unpleasant to use. But I've noticed those typically tend to use the CPU, even on a Zen3 or Intel 11th gen IGP, even on Windows + Edge.
That is not how GPU multiplexing works on Laptops. My dGPU most certainly works on battery, though I can directly disable it if I like (or use a power saving power plan).
For example, I could disable the nvidia card on my ThinkPad W530, but then i'd lose the use of the external video output (because it was wired to the nvidia card).
and yes i know it depends on whether the laptop has a mux or not... it's not always easy to determine, not all reviews go explicitly over this detail...
I just don't want a discrete graphics card. Not an nVidia one for sure.
It works, but it sucks power like no tomorrow if it actually stays on. Its basically unusable if you want more than hour or two of battery life (or you use it in short bursts for compute).
> That being said, Firefox and Chromium use the integrated GPU more than you think, and they feel faster with a stronger IGP. Just try disabling some of the gpu acceleration and see how it feels.
i have strongs doubts the doxygen webpages i spend time on will get any faster with an nvidia 3090.
You can usually disable it completely in the BIOS, and it won't be drawing power if it isn't doing anything. I can get wanting to not pay extra, but realistically supporting an extra custom hardware configuration probably costs more than they would save on the part.
> The issue is that on some machines, the video-out ports go through the dGPU. Does that still work if the card is disabled in the BIOS?
Traditionally yes; the machine is designed to only run the dGPU under heavy load, not all the time, the BIOS setting just disables doing the thing that you did in the "heavy load" condition. I guess there might be machines it wouldn't work on but I've never known any.
i spend most of my time in firefox and in terminals. i do use virtual machines quite a lot to test stuff around, so high cores count and high memory would be a plus for me.
but an nvidia gpu is a deal breaker for me. I just don't want it. I don't need it, i don't use it, it just makes the whole thing less usable. and it draws a lot power that i'd prefer using otherwise.
the intel integrated gpu is not only sufficient for me, i actually WANT it. it just works under gnu/linux and i don't have to mess with drivers.
I cannot stress enough how much i hate having to deal with proprietary drivers.
and last time i played a videogame, it was openarena, and it ran beautifully on the intel hd 600 my work laptop had (dell latitude 7390, great little machine).
edit: regarding amd gpus... i'm not sure. i've been told they work with open source drivers, but still it's a power usage i would happily avoid.