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I upgraded to Windows 10 Fall Creators Update recently, and when I went to Task Manager, I found that they now have the option to monitor GPU usage (Thumbs up to Microsoft, that feature is going to be so useful). But this showed me that when I ran a game on the dedicated graphics card, the Intel GPU sits there chilling.

When I run a game on Intel HD Graphics, I found that it is actually decent (I have an i7) and only a few steps behind the dedicated Radeon 530 in my computer. Is there a way for me to use both graphics cards for an FPS boost on games? I have a Mid-range device, and I'm hoping that I might be able to run some better games.

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    Although you can't combine them for the same application you can indeed dedicate the discrete GPU for games and the Intel one for the rest. If you are running a game in a window, a browser or a graphics intensive application you can see the nvidia being used, but if you open the start menu you can see the Intel being used. I mean it could be useful for multitasking balancing the power among applications. Apr 2, 2018 at 21:26
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    @CarlosRafaelRamirez Yeah that is what happens...
    – skillz21
    Apr 2, 2018 at 22:46

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You cannot combine their power.

To do so would require a lot of management and knowledge of the strengths of each GPU and preferably game support as well.

Ideally graphics processors require similar processing ability for this to be "easiest" and doing it across brands of graphics chips is likely to be impossible due to them handling everything differently.

It would be like putting two engines in your car, one diesel and one petrol, and expecting them to work well together.

To understand how difficult a problem this actually is try reading Wikipedias information on SLI, which is Nvidias multi-GPU tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface#Implementation

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  • Does connecting a monitor to a motherboard with integrated graphics have any performance impact versus plugging directly into the GPU?
    – Stevoisiak
    Sep 1, 2020 at 21:38
  • @Stevoisiak it depends where the decoding or rendering takes place. If windows pushes decoding video onto a more powerful graphics card (dGPU) while the monitor is connected to an iGPU then those decoded frames will have to be copied between the two GPU memories (e.g. dGPU memory to system RAM for the iGPU) across the PCIe bus. It may still be overall faster, better quality or achieve higher framerates, but will have an impact. How small or large the impact may be would depend on all the various parts of the system involved..
    – Mokubai
    Sep 11, 2020 at 14:22

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