Background story: I recently bought a computer with AMD 7000 series CPU and GPU.
amdgpu_top reports 15 ~ 20 watts in normal desktop usage, but as soon as I have video playing in VLC, it goes to 45 watts constantly which is undesirable behavior especially in summer. (I hope that is just reporting issue… but my computer is hot)
When I do DRI_PRIME=1 vlc and then play videos, amdgpu_top doesn't report the power surge. (I have iGPU enabled)
Is there anything more convenient then modifying individual .desktop files? KDE malfunctions when I put export DRI_PRIME=1 in .xprofile so that's a no go.
Solved: removing mesa related hardware acceleration package makes VLC fall back to libplacebo which doesn't do these weird things.
One thing you could do is plugging your monitor straight into the iGPU outputs and using DRI_PRIME only for applications that need the powerful dGPU.
Unless you want to run either everything or nothing on a specific GPU, I don't think there's a more convenient way than setting DRI_PRIME per application.
I do this. It's part of a GPU passthrough setup, but in practice there aren't many applications that require PRIME offload. I don't use it for web browsers where I watch a lot of videos. I haven't used VLC in a little bit but I'm pretty sure I don't use it there either. Games and graphical applications. If I was doing video editing or modeling I would probably want it there too.