[Feature request] Enable / disable dGPU when it should not be active

First of all let me say thank you for this project! It’s hard to believe this didn’t exist a couple of months ago.

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Sometimes the dGPU will stay active after Advanced Optimus switches cards (from dGPU to iGPU); some apps keep using the dGPU even through they shouldn’t. Similar tools already implement fixes for this: https://github.com/BartoszCichecki/LenovoLegionToolkit#deactivate-discrete-nvidia-gpu

Describe the solution you’d like

Implement a way to force stuck apps to move to the iGPU, either by killing them (could be bad); or disabling/enabling the dGPU temporarily (good if no critical process is using it).

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

I have a small script to do the latter for me:

pnputil /disable-device "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_2860&SUBSYS_14731043&REV_A1\4&17526e30&0&0008"
timeout /nobreak /t 3 > NUL
pnputil /enable-device "PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_2860&SUBSYS_14731043&REV_A1\4&17526e30&0&0008"
timeout /nobreak /t 3 > NUL

Could be nice to have a button (e.g. in the “Extra” window) to do this for us, conditioned by the fact that the dGPU is not driving the display (and other conditions maybe?).

[danielrs]

We can reopen if we desire to explore this again 😃

[seerge]

@danielrs hello.

Restart GPU (via pnputil) is already in g-helper actually, but app offers to run it only as a last resort if switching to “Eco” mode (i.e. powering dPGU off) is refused by bios on first attempt. This is quite “invasive” operation (windows could BSOD from that even) and I’m not sure if it’s a very good idea to add it as a publicly accessible button somewhere in UI 😃

But you can manually execute this operation (in powershell as admin)

$device = Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object { $_.FriendlyName -imatch 'NVIDIA' -and $_.Class -eq 'Display' }; Disable-PnpDevice $device.InstanceId -Confirm:$false; Start-Sleep -Seconds 3; Enable-PnpDevice $device.InstanceId -Confirm:$false

Killing apps using GPU is also implemented in the app (under Extra), but it’s executed prior to setting “Eco” mode as well (again to help bios to power off GPU)

That button could be added to the UI (it’s even in the poll for new features https://github.com/seerge/g-helper/discussions/583 )