Problem with switchable graphic cards

[postbuz]

Hi,

My HP notebook has 2 graphics cards. An on-chip Intel HD Graphics 4600 and a second AMD Radeon HD8750M. Via a "control center" you can select per program which graphics card you want to use.

Pale Moon 27.4.0 (64-bit) on Win-7 Pro works fine with the (low-performance) on-board card, but when used with the (high-performance) AMD Radeon, I get only this:

Others browsers that I sometimes use for fall back (Vivaldi, Cyberfox, IE) work fine with the AMD.

The drivers are the latest released by HP.

Any ideas what I could do to get PM to work with the AMD card?

Kind Regards.

[eskaton]

You can try the steps outlined here: viewtopic.php?f=29&t=15083&p=114818#p114818

I have a laptop with Intel HD 4000 graphics paired with an nVidia GT 650m. HWA worked fine until the 27 branch. It seems that the backend graphics updates/changes (direct2d 1.1, etc) causes a problem there. Drivers for both GPUs are the most recent (March or April this year for the HD4000 and last month's for the 650m).

The first two options listed in the link did not work for me, and I'd rather have full acceleration on the HD4000 than very limited acceleration on the 650m. Just this weekend I tried setting different options in the nVidia control panel for then entry on palemoon.exe, but none of those changes alleviated the problem. Out of curiosity, I downloaded Firefox portable 54.0.1 and set it to use HWA on the 650m. Things went alright for a while, but eventually it started crashing out as well.

It's very annoying that other browsers (SlimJet, IE) don't seem to have a problem. It's pretty rare to find a laptop these days that either has a solely dedicated AMD/nVidia gpu, or one with an actual 'hardware' switch allowing you to shut off the igpu. I'd be happy to volunteer my time to test things further if someone led me in the right direction.

[Moonchild]

In general, dual-GPU laptops are designed with one very specific setup in mind: Desktop software/utilities/etc. will use the iGPU, and full-screen, dedicated and exclusively-running games will use the NV GPU (in exclusive full-screen mode, i.e.: no compositing to the desktop). Trying to find a way to composite the "gaming" mode into desktop use is tricky and crash-prone, because the hardware is not very cooperative, and drivers in general also aren't written to deal with mixing surfaces from one GPU with compositing layers from another GPU. Theoretically, this should be perfectly fine, but in practice... well, you've all seen the results

So, the best I can say is: YMMV. If it works for you, fantastic. If you have issues with the NV/AMD gaming GPU in Pale Moon, then you should use the (desktop-application intended) Intel chipset. It's not the fastest in comparison, but should certainly be fast enough for browsing and media playback.

[postbuz]

Hi eskaton023 & Moonchild,

I see the logic why a dedicated card makes sense for gaming (only). OTH, my notebook is an HP Pro, so they wouldn't have had gaming in mind when they developed it . Anyway, it came with this & I never paid it much mind. Run some graphics & video programs on the AMD., just because I can. I've tried option 2 in the post referred to & that works in getting Pale Moon to run on the AMD. Only downside is that my fonts look slight worse... So for now I'll think I'll run Pale Moon on the on-board card. So much for HP's promise of seamless integration It's not a big loss in real word terms anyway.

Thanks you both!