GNOME 3.36 Bringing Better Multi-GPU Handling With Switcheroo-Control, NVIDIA Support

For a few years GNOME has supported a "launch on discrete GPU" option for applications within the Shell's menu while for GNOME 3.36 that support is being cleaned up and extended to also handle NVIDIA GPU configurations.

GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has been cleaning up the switcheroo-control code so it doesn't rely upon the Linux kernel's VGA_Switcheroo, support more than two GPUs, and better handling of the main/secondary handling. For end-users the big addition is support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Nocera and others have cleaned up switcheroo-control and exposing an improved D-Bus API for handling this better GPU switching / launching on separate GPU behavior and will be part of GNOME 3.36.

More details on the forthcoming GNOME switcheroo-control improvements via this blog post.