Running Steam games on hybrid laptops(Nvidia + Intel/Amd)

General system Newbie
1
  1. Installing Steam, if you have Nvidia dGPU be sure to also install lib32-nvidia-utils.
sudo pacman -S steam lib32-nvidia-utils
  1. You can install OptimusManager or Envycontrol for the switching into the GPU mode, because sadly, most of the steam games cannot themselves automaticaly choose dGPU as a main one.
    But, I prefer to use package nvidia-prime 
sudo pacman -S nvidia-prime
  1. To use it in terminal just write -
prime-run steam

And all games which are running from steam will use a dGPU.
Strangely, if you add prime-run as an argument for a specific game inside of a steam, it’s sometimes won’t use dGPU.
The same story if you modify steam.desktop file arguments from GUI.
You need to modify steam.desktop at /home/user/.local/share/applications/ manually by modifying this line -

Exec=/usr/bin/steam-runtime

Just add prime-run at the beginning

Exec=prime-run /usr/bin/steam-runtime

That’s it. You can check usage of the GPU with nvtop package.

Additionaly -
If you want to connect external monitor, if you have type-c port there’s a high chance that it has an HDMI support. So instead of using HDMI port which is physically linked to the dGPU on hybrid laptops, instead of switching into the dGPU only mode try first to use type-c to HDMI cable.

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