[SOLVED] Do APU's and dedicated GPU's work together ?

[Iver Hicarte]

Greetings!

I am not posting this thread just to ask if it's worth it to just go with an APU instead of a dedicated GPU, which the obvious answer will be no. It's better off to buy a dedicated GPU and a better CPU, anyways, my main question is, will an APU and GPU work together in real world scenarios like everyday use like gaming, heavy editing and browsing the net ? And is there a performance difference if an APU does work in tandem with the GPU? In simpler terms, is the APU gonna be fully utilized or will all workloads be handled by the GPU?

 

[CountMike]

Greetings!

I am not posting this thread just to ask if it's worth it to pair an APU with a dedicated GPU, which the obvious answer will be no. It's better off to buy a dedicated GPU and a better CPU, anyways, my main question is, will an APU and GPU work together in real world scenarios like everyday use like gaming, heavy editing and browsing the net. And is there a performance difference if an APU does work in tandem with the GPU? In simpler terms, is the APU gonna be fully utilized or will all workloads will be handled by the GPU?

That depends on motherboard and it's BIOS. Most of the time IGPU is turned off when dedicated GPU is inserted and some times automatically.
In case it's enabled, the rest is up to OS to handle.

 

[drea.drechsler]

... In simpler terms, is the APU gonna be fully utilized or will all workloads be handled by the GPU?

Intel doesn't call their CPU/iGPU combo's an APU, and I don't have one myself to know for certain, but I believe you can use the iGPU to compress the video while streaming gaming activity. That leaves the GPU free to achieve the ultra-high FPS gamers love.

It would be curious to know if you can do the same with AMD's APU's when accompanied with a dGPU and mounted to a board with BIOS that allows it.

 

[TerryLaze]

It would be curious to know if you can do the same with AMD's APU's when accompanied with a dGPU and mounted to a board with BIOS that allows it.

You would be able to, OBS has a special version that uses AMD, the thing is that AMD doesn't have a special transcoding hardware but just uses normal shaders so you could only do a stream as high as your iGPU allows while intel's qsv can do anything up to 4k/60FPS and even above that because of the special hardware.

 

[TerryLaze]

Greetings!

I am not posting this thread just to ask if it's worth it to pair an APU with a dedicated GPU, which the obvious answer will be no. It's better off to buy a dedicated GPU and a better CPU, anyways, my main question is, will an APU and GPU work together in real world scenarios like everyday use like gaming, heavy editing and browsing the net ? And is there a performance difference if an APU does work in tandem with the GPU? In simpler terms, is the APU gonna be fully utilized or will all workloads be handled by the GPU?

You can tell windows to use one or the other for each software you want to but there isn't much use for it, unless your dedicated uses a lot more power to do simple things that what your APU uses you won't have much benefit.

They will not work on the same task (game/video coding) at the same time.

Normal scenario, your apu will be sitting idle all the time unless you connect a second monitor to it in which case it will still barely do anything.

 

[drea.drechsler]

.. the thing is that AMD doesn't have a special transcoding hardware but just uses normal shaders so you could only do a stream as high as your iGPU allows ...

Funny thing is that AMD's iGPU's are far superior to Intels'. I'm left wondering if that's really all that's needed to achieve necessary transcoding performance. Especially so in newer Ryzen based APU's, like 5600G in particular.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Funny thing is that AMD's iGPU's are far superior to Intels'. I'm left wondering if that's really all that's needed to achieve necessary transcoding performance. Especially so in newer Ryzen based APU's, like 5600G in particular.

Dedicated hardware units will usually be superior to general purpose units. It's the only reason why ray tracing can be done in real time now.

 

[drea.drechsler]

Dedicated hardware units will usually be superior to general purpose units. It's the only reason why ray tracing can be done in real time now.

I didn't say 'better'...I said enough to achieve necessary performance. We're talking budget-oriented hardware when talking about APU's, nobody is expecting them to outperform $2000 discrete GPU's in ray tracing.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I didn't say 'better'...I said enough to achieve necessary performance. We're talking budget-oriented hardware when talking about APU's, nobody is expecting them to outperform $2000 discrete GPU's in ray tracing.

The ray tracing thing was an example of needing a dedicated hardware unit to achieve acceptable performance because general purpose units are too slow (for the most part anyway).

AMD's APUs lack dedicated hardware units to encode video, so they cannot or may not perform encoding and rendering at the same time as fast as an Intel GPU because the APU has to use a non-trivial amount of its shaders to encoding, whereas Intel's GPUs can dedicate all of its shaders to rendering because there's a separate unit doing the video encoding.

 

[drea.drechsler]

...
APU has to use a non-trivial amount of its shaders to encoding, whereas Intel's GPUs can dedicate all of its shaders to rendering because there's a separate unit doing the video encoding.

Keep in mind OP's original question, he's only interested in whether the iGPU will work along with a dGPU. So in that scenario it doesn't matter if the APU has to dedicate all it's shaders to encoding since that's all it has to do anyway as the dGPU is handling the rendering. You seem to be turning this into a benchmark comparison the APU will necessarily lose at since it lacks dedicated hardware. That's irrelevant as the iGPU only needs to be good enough and I'm wondering if it is good enough to transcode while the dGPU is rendering the frames. The standard put forth by @TerryLaze is at 4K/60fps so that will mean a pretty good APU would be needed...possibly something like a 5600G or 5700G...just to sustain gaming action at that same resolution/FPS. I assume there is no point in streaming at greater resolution than you can game at, btw. That will have a pretty good iGPU to go along with it.

 

[TerryLaze]

The standard put forth by @TerryLaze is at 4K/60fps so that will mean a pretty good APU would be needed...possibly something like a 5600G or 5700G...just to sustain gaming action at that same resolution/FPS. I assume there is no point in streaming at greater resolution than you can game at, btw. That will have a pretty good iGPU to go along with it.

While it's probably possible, and 4k streaming is definitely not standard, if it can do 1080 it's gonna be enough for most people, you have to keep in mind that the APU is going to run at a high utilization meaning that it will produce a lot of heat and take away a bunch of power envelope from the CPU part making it all pretty complicated because it could potentially make your CPU slower if you push it too much.

 

[hotaru.hino]

You seem to be turning this into a benchmark comparison the APU will necessarily lose at since it lacks dedicated hardware.

???
I don't see any benchmarks that I supposedly posted.

That's irrelevant as the iGPU only needs to be good enough and I'm wondering if it is good enough to transcode while the dGPU is rendering the frames.

And I'll admit I just breezed right past to the original post I quoted and had no context of what was going on other than you saying that AMD's iGPUs were superior to Intel's and there was video encoding involved, and I was merely pointing out that Intel's iGPUs have dedicated media codec units whereas AMD's iGPUs do not.