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 How to know if I'm fully leveraging my PC hardware with TBC?

Nathan Balcom's profile image
Nathan Balcom posted 05-18-2023 11:35

Hello!

I currently have a Dell Precision 7740 with an i7-9750H, 16 GB RAM, and a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 discrete GPU.  I use the built in mini display port and the HDMi port for the two main monitors I run.  
I'm not sure if Windows changed or if TBC changed, but I used to be able to right click on the TBC icon and in the pop up menu was an option to choose which GPU TBC used.  That option is gone now.  In the NVIDIA Control Panel I have the GPU selected for the base profile, I have the Nvidia GPU selected as the PhysX processor.

I noticed a change in the Performance tab of the Task manager recently as well.  about a year or so ago, if I moved the full screen of TBC to my laptop screen and zoomed in and out, and rolled a project around in the 3D view, the integrated Intel GPU would show more increased activity compared to the discrete GPU. If I placed the full screen of TBC into one of the external monitors that's connected to the discrete GPU through the HDMI or mini display port and repeated the same motions of zooming in and out and rolling the project around, the discrete GPU would show increased activity.  I just tried this same experiment and saw the discrete GPU showing increased activity regardless of the screen it was on.

All of this is from a discussion I'm having with my managers about getting an upgraded mobile workstation and handing this one off to an employee I'll be training to use TBC, read plans, develop RFI's for our various PM's to send off.  I'd push for a desktop, but the guy coming into learn and I will both still be on jobsites for our crews supporting them and adjusting in realtime the info we give to our field crews.  I noticed the newest versions of the Dell Precision 7770 and 5770 have one or no dedicated video ports, and instead have thunderbolt with display port capability and or HDMI 2.1 (DGPU)  

I had a live chat with a Dell associate and they weren't able to answer how all of the internal brains would be utilized with TBC.

What I'd like to know is how can I make sure the internal components are being used to best way that TBC can use them?  Will I run into issues outputting to monitors over thunderbolt as display port?  Any advice is great.  How does TBC interact with and decide what piece of hardware should do specific tasks?

Thanks!

Andrew Klingenberg's profile image
Andrew Klingenberg posted 05-18-2023 15:00

I have a somewhat similar but slightly older machine, a Precision 7730 with Xeon E-2176M, 128GB ECC RAM, Quadro P3200 GPU.  It's usually connected to a TB19 dock with either single or dual Thunderbolt, and I have my displays connected through the TB19 docks -- either dual 1920x1200 or 4K monitors, using a mix of HDMI and mDP.  No issues with this setup as far as displays, with TBC or other applications.  I'm not exactly sold on the Thunderbolt connection/dock though... it's got the bandwidth but there is a lot of additional downstream hardware in the mix that makes things more complicated and slightly more unstable.  If you want a single plug-in for a dock that does everything it's your best bet though.  Mine are generally good but do have the occasional hiccup.

In Win10 22H2 the setting for which GPU to use per-program is in Settings >> Display >> Graphics settings >> Graphics performance preference.

I am told the newer Precision laptops are a bit more stable hardware-wise than the older generations (specifically 7730).  They get cranky with certain combinations of hardware and settings and like to start freezing and/or blue-screening.

There is the option in the BIOS to disable the integrated GPU and always use the discrete GPU (MUX switch), but I started having frequent issues with the USB bus on mine when I did that.  If it's stable on your hardware that's the easiest way to force using dGPU for everything if that's what you want, though battery life will be abysmal if not docked.  I did not see any noticeable performance degradation on my machine letting the dGPU mux back into the iGPU and only using dGPU for certain applications.

YMMV.