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Dell Precision 5560 not using GPU
Hey everyone, I've had my fair share of dell workstations, from the XPS 9570, Precision 5550, Precision 5560. Currently I am using an upgraded Precision 5560 as I have some high workload, either a ton of applications and servers open at once while also juggling documentation and remote desktop connections. Or I am editing 4k video and rendering a ton of photos in Lightroom.
I connect my laptop to a Dell WD19 TBS so I am able to have 3x 1920x1080 displays along with my laptop to bring a total of 4x displays at my disposal.
The specification of my laptop is as follows:
11th Generation Intel i7 - 11850H
32GB DDR4 Memory
2x 256 NVMe SSD
NVIDIA T1200 GPU
I had this problem with my previous precision and previous XPS. The issue I get is that the laptop never seems to want to use the GPU. I'd imagine that the NVIDIA would have an easier time rendering my 4 displays or even 3 of them than my Intel UHD Graphics.
I've changed my PhysX rendering inside the Geforce experience and NVIDIA control panel to say that it should always use the GPU and I have also tried some rendering tasks like in Premiere Pro which all seem to be heavy on the RAM and not touch the GPU which is strange, the GPU seems absolutely useless in this machine unless I'm missing something. Whereas at home on my desktop the displays are physically connected to my RTX 4070 so everything I do on Windows and in any application get ran through the GPU leaving my CPU to do the calculations. I'd like the same setup with the laptop so that my CPU is free to do other tasks and make the whole experience more holistic but I can't seem to change it or understand that I'm doing something wrong, maybe I am misunderstanding how these GPUs in these laptops work. But when I had my XPS which had a GTX 1050Ti I assumed that it's a little more "gamer" orientated having a gaming GPU but it could not run any games at all as the GPU like my precision never seems to kick in.
Can anyone please shed some light on this? Maybe I am totally missing the mark, but it's got me thinking to maybe buy an external GPU holder and putting a desktop GTX1080 into my machine using thunderbolt...
A follow-up question, would anyone know if this setup of a Precision 5560 and a WD19 TBS run a 5th screen (including laptop) at a resolution higher than 1920x1080, I am thinking of putting an ultrawide above my 3x 1920x1080 displays so I have this surround almost of displays above me.
kalfy
11 Posts
2
March 30th, 2023 03:00
Hi, I think you have the same questions as myself and a lot of other Precision users - poor performance because everything is being forced to use integrated graphics.
I have posted about it here: Force DWM.exe & Windows processes to use discrete GPU? Precision 5560 SLOW & unresponsive - Dell Community
That includes a description of a partial workaround. I say partial because I haven't been able to find a fix to get the laptop to use the discrete NVidia GPU for everything on a permanent basis, but I have been able to get it to use the discrete GPU in specific windowed or productivity apps. If you're using fullscreen 3D apps, the laptop should already be using the discrete GPU for those and I think my thread mentions how you can check that in Task Manager by seeing which GPU the apps are accessing (GPU 0 is usually integrated, GPU 1 is usually discrete GPU).
With these laptops, there is no hardware switch between the integrated graphics and discrete GPU - even if you get the laptop to use the discrete GPU it has to funnel everything through the integrated graphics channel. This is especially the case with external monitors on this laptop because there is no direct connection from external monitor to discrete GPU - everything goes through the integrated graphics. That doesn't mean your programs and processes can't take advantage of the hardware power of your discrete GPU but it will be funneled through the integrated graphics channel and potentially bottlenecked by that. It's not great in all honesty and for the price of these laptops I really feel it's a terrible design choice by Dell not to have a hardware graphics switch.
Hope that helps a bit even though it's not a real fix. I've been banging my head against a wall with this for five months.