In this particular title there wasn’t too much of a difference, but the external screen was performing better. I’ve got the laptop screen test shown by the purple bars, the external monitor connected over HDMI in the red bars, and I’ve tested all setting levels.
These are the results from Red Dead Redemption 2 which was tested with the games benchmark tool. Anyway with all that out of the way, let’s get into the gaming benchmarks. If you’re not sure which GPU is in use, you can simply check the task manager performance tab to see which are active with a graphical load running. This disables the laptop screen without the need to close the lid, which is useful as some laptops require the lid to be open to cool properly.
#EXTERNAL GPU FOR LAPTOPS GAMING WINDOWS#
To avoid this, either close the lid of the laptop, or most laptops have a shortcut key you can press to select which display to use, so use that and just pick second screen only, you can also just do this through Windows too.
It’s important to note that when using an external screen, you’ll still get low FPS if the laptop's screen is in use because the Intel GPU will still be active.
Literally the only difference is that I’ve tested either with the laptops screen, so Nvidia RTX 2070 pushing frames via the Intel GPU to the laptop’s display, or with the external screen connected to the laptops HDMI port which skips the Intel GPU and connects straight to the Nvidia RTX 2070.
#EXTERNAL GPU FOR LAPTOPS GAMING 1080P#
All testing was done with the same Windows updates, Nvidia drivers, and with a 1080p resolution. To demonstrate this, I’ve tested the Eluktronics MAX-17 gaming laptop with and without an external monitor connected. There will be no difference if the port is connected to the integrated graphics though. This same idea should also apply to AMD Vega integrated graphics. Many laptops that have display output ports such as HDMI or DisplayPort have them wired directly to the discrete graphics, meaning that by running an external monitor connected to one of these we’ll be bypassing the Intel integrated graphics and Optimus as a result. This also applies for current laptops that have G-Sync, as G-Sync requires a direct connection between the screen and Nvidia GPU to work. If your laptop only uses the discrete graphics and doesn’t have Optimus, like the Aorus 15, or allows you the option of disabling Optimus after a reboot, like the Lenovo Y540, then you’re probably not going to see a performance difference with an external screen as you’re already bypassing Optimus. Depending on the game and settings, this can result in a bottleneck situation where the integrated graphics reduces gaming performance. If you start up a game though, the more powerful discrete graphics will be used to render the frames, however in an Optimus system the discrete GPU sends this output via the lower powered integrated graphics. These higher powered discrete graphics options basically sit idle when there are no GPU intensive tasks running on the system. This has the advantage of improving battery life, as they’re more efficient and require less power to operate, however the downside is gaming performance kind of sucks when compared to what AMD and Nvidia have on offer. This basically means that the lower powered integrated graphics within the processor are used to send display signal to the screen. Connecting an external monitor to a laptop should increase gaming performance in most instances, let’s discuss why this is the case, and find out just how big the difference is in a number of different games.