Second life Dual gpu issues

[Zawane]

I'm using a pc with dual gpu's (similar to a laptop) one low power intel hd 530, and 1 high power nvidia 2060 super. I'm telling windows to use the high power card like I do for all my games, but for some reason second life won't do it. It just crashes out without doing anything (firestorm brings up crash report). Before anyone says it yes I know I can plug my monitor into the nvidia card and use it that way, but I prefer to keep it as it is for power saving options when not gaming. Second life (and firestorm) are the ONLY app that won't switch cards. Any suggestions on getting this working? Thank you. 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

Check the nVidia control panel and make sure the 2060 is set as the default OpenGL card. Also try plugging a video cable into the 2060. The other end doesn't need to be plugged into anything. 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

What you describe is not even remotely a "dual GPU" setup. Those are way past their prime and literally more harm than gain anyway.

Your CPU has a chip for integrated onboard graphics, more or less a "back-up" solution. Then you got a single dedicated GPU with that 2060. iGPU and GPU in a desktop don't work like that laptop concept. 

If you plug your monitor into your onboard graphics, your dedicated GPU won't get used at all, no matter what software settings you're trying to set. 

Modern cards like yours usually come with very efficient power savings anyway. All you get from using the iGPU is unneeded hassle.

Edited August 1, 2020 by Lillith Hapmouche

[Zawane]

I'll try that later Lyssa. Thank you.

Sorry Lillith, but you're wrong about that. I've watched my in game settings report my nvidia properly as well as see its usage on task manager showing the use and activity of both gpu's. Also before you try to say I don't know what I'm talking about I have more than 25 years experience as a pc tech. Just not had this particular problem before.   

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Well, with that experience, you can easily fix your problem on your own, while your monitor remains plugged in to onboard graphics. 🙂

[Lyssa Greymoon]

You may also need to set the primary video to PCIe or Auto in BIOS. nVidia cards in my Lenovo would happily pass video through the motherboard video out when the only display was connected to it, but my 1650 Super won't. I had to change the primary video to IGP in BIOS because secure boot is permanently on and it won't boot with newer cards as the primary video device.

Lunus Tech Tips did something like this gaming on an nVidia P106 mining card with no display output. There may be something helpful in there for you.

 

[Zawane]

Yes Lyssa that's exactly where I got this idea from, and for every other app it works perfectly. It's only SL that has an issue with it. 

[Nalates Urriah]

There are some threads here about using duel video cards with SL. Plus there are some how to's around the net.

I am not sure what you mean by duel GPUs.  It is a bit hard to count GPUs these day as Nvidia says,

...GPU has all 2304 shaders enabled, NVIDIA has disabled some shading units on the GeForce RTX 2060 to reach the product's target shader count. It features 1920 shading units, 120 texture mapping units, and 48 ROPs. Also included are 240 tensor cores which help improve the speed of machine learning applications. The card also has 30 raytracing acceleration cores.

But I suppose that is a single GPU to most of us. We usually refer to duel GPUs in SL as being two cards. So, two 2060 cards or 1060's or some pair of cards. 

Intel has a GPU section built into their CPU chips. They say it this way,

Intel manufactures the -9600K on its 14nm++ process. In addition to six execution cores (without Hyper-Threading technology), the chip includes an integrated UHD 630 graphics engine, sports unlocked ratio multipliers for easy overclocking, and supports two channels of DDR4-2666 memory.

I suppose we could call that a GPU. But it is within the CPU chip and uses system RAM not having dedicated memory like an AMD or Nvidia card does.I think it likely to be near impossible to get that 630 engine and a Nvidia/AMD card to cooperate and act as duel video processors.

Even with two Nvidia cards cooperating one does rendering and one does support as the viewer's render process is described as a single thread process. 

So... what do you mean by duel GPUs and which ones do you have?

[Lillith Hapmouche]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

I suppose we could call that a GPU

Errr... it's pretty much common practice to call those iGPU, i for integrated.