Yes, you can safely disable IGPU depending on your system and requirements.
Yes, you can safely disable IGPU depending on your system and requirements.
So my labtop has been weird, sometimes games will use my IGPU instead of my dedicated gpu, which is far stronger. Also, my IGPU takes 2GB of ram to run, and the games I run are pretty ram heavy, so I was wondering if theres a way to disable it and get most if not all my ram back from my IGPU, and only use my dedicated gpu?
Your screen is linked to the IGPU, meaning you can't turn it off. The DGPU sends frames through the PCI-E bus to the IGPU for display—interesting feature. You can adjust your graphics settings to assign specific apps to a particular GPU, which resolves this issue.
Similar to you, I was surprised to notice my Ryzen 3550H using 2 GB of system RAM for the integrated graphics. I've looked into this several times and haven't found a method to adjust how much dedicated memory it uses. From what I understand, you can't change the pre-set amount, which is quite disappointing, especially since your total RAM is only 8 GB and that extra 2 GB is essential. You'd have to either upgrade your RAM or enable paging file (virtual memory). You might need to expand its size if you can't afford a bigger drive. (Hopefully your system has fast NVMe storage, as relying on virtual memory would be slower.) It seems AMD likely made this adjustment in their 4th and 5th generation Ryzen mobile CPUs, reducing the iGPU's allocation to around 500 MB. Good luck! If you discover a better solution, let me know. (P.S., I own an AMD 3550H and a 3500u, both requiring 2 GB for the graphics card. My 5700u uses closer to 500 MB.)
They consume a lot of RAM. Intel allocates around 16 to 128 MB upfront, then adjusts the rest as required. AMD’s approach is even stricter with memory limits.
I completely understand. Switching from Intel APUs that allocated resources on demand, or using a consistent 128 MB, was really annoying. The BIOS never fixed the problem with the third-gen Ryzen APUs' IME.
If I were creating an APU, I’d use dynamic memory management similar to what AMD does with their current Ryzen processors—pairing it with a package and I/O die. But with RAM built into the package instead.
The decision by AMD wasn't due to any other factor—money was the main reason. The low-end market loss was largely driven by financial constraints. Intel's advanced technology comes at a high cost, requiring significant time and space in development. Intel has ample resources to invest heavily in innovative designs. In fact, they allocate a substantial portion of their budget each quarter toward driver development for their new GPUs, far exceeding the combined software development spending of AMD and nVidia over an entire year.