system76-power is a utility for managing graphics and power profiles.
The iGPU (Intel) is used exclusively.
Lower graphical performance with a longer battery life.
External displays connected to the dGPU ports cannot be used.
The dGPU (NVIDIA) is used exclusively.
Higher graphical performance at the expense of a shorter battery life.
Allows using external displays.
Enables PRIME render offloading. The iGPU is used as the primary renderer, with the ability to have specific applications render using the dGPU.
PRIME render offloading requires the 435.17 NVIDIA drivers or later.
Applications must use GLVND to take advantage of this feature, so may not
render on the dGPU even when requested. Vulkan applications must be launched
with __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1
to render on the dGPU. GLX applications must
be launched with __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia
to render on the dGPU.
External displays connected to the dGPU ports cannot be used. The NVIDIA drivers currently do not support display offload sink ("reverse PRIME") when configured for render offloading.
NVIDIA driver power management is only fully implemented for Turing cards. This allows them to enter a low power state when not used. It currently requires manually adding some udev rules to work correctly. Pascal cards are not supported and will remain on, even when not in use.