Hello! This might not be the right community but I’m looking at building a new server and you operate in similar areas and might have experience with this. I’ve got a GPU without video outputs, can I combine that with a CPU without integrated graphics and still get video output from the HDMI located on the motherboard?
I just did a quick bing chat search (“does DRI_PRIME work on systems without a cpu with integrated graphics?”) and it says it will work. I can’t check for you because my CPUs all have graphics.
I CAN tell you that some motherboards will support it (my ASUS does) and some don’t (my MSI).
BTW, I’m talking about Linux. If you’re using Windows, there’s a whole series of hoops you have to jump through. LTT did a video a while back.
While it might work in the OS, setting the OS up may be a pain (the installer may or may not work like that) and I strongly suspect that the BIOS can’t handle it.
I suspect that an easier route would be to use a cheap, maybe older, low-end graphics card for the video output and then using DRI_PRIME with that with the other graphics card.
It’s probably a pain to set up in Windows. In Linux, it just works, there’s nothing to set up. I’m using it right now.
OP really should have mentioned their OS.
Edit: Actually, nevermind both my posts. I know DRI_PRIME works by using my APU for regular desktop activity, and routing discrete GPU output in whenever a game is being played. But I don’t know if it’s possible to make it use the dGPU all the time.
Even if it did, it would only work inside the OS, so if you had to boot into the BIOS for anything, you wouldn’t have a display. So for all intents and purposes, it wouldn’t really work.