My notebook is a 2014 acer with Intel core i7 running Windows 10, and it has two GPUs: one is an Intel graphics Family and another one is an AMD Radeon HD 8670M (part of the 8600 Family I think). I noted while plotting charts with hundres of thousands of points using in ggplot2 or gganimate that only the Intel GPU works while the plots are being rendered. The AMD sits idle, even though sometimes the Intel GPU is quite busy. I tried googling, to no avail. Would anyone have some pointer to share at least? Any further hardware/software info I would need to post to make this question "answerable"? Thanks in advance!
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1i'm not sure about your particular laptop, but usually dual gpu setups will switch between them, not use them in parallel (which would need something like an SLI bridge with similar model and family which would also run at the slower card's speed). yours might not be switching based on your settings and/or power/battery saver mode. further, it seems very unlikely that you need to plot several hundred thousand points, especially with ggplot which is notoriously slow even with several hundred points – rawr Aug 04 '20 at 00:04
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Many thanks for the feedback. Good idea - I’ll check the power settings, probably there is something there enabling me to at least turn on the switching, giving that it doesn’t seem to be occurring at all. And on ggplot and the dataset size, I wasn’t positing that I would be plotting large datasets, I already am - checking out the task manager while it ran (specifically with gganimate) was what led me to note the AMD GPU wasn’t being used at all. Thanks again for the insight! – Douglas K Aug 04 '20 at 00:57
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Turns out that even when allowing the AMD GPU to work in the power settings, R still doesn't touch it, unfortunately. – Douglas K Aug 05 '20 at 09:57