I saw that there was a related discussion post from about 3 years ago, but skimming through it it looked like there wasn’t a lot of concrete data to go on yet for giving recommendations at the time that they made the post, and the person making the original inquiry had a bit of a different use case than me.
I have a first edition of the Framework 16 on which I’ve installed Windows 11. I have a couple of programming/research projects I’m working on, so I just upgraded my RAM to better accommodate my workflow (IDE open, several browser tabs open for reference, etc). Today I managed to crash it switching between workspaces (the Desktop 1, Desktop 2 thing that Windows lets you do now), so I decided to try watching the Task Manager when opening everything back up to see what was going on. I noticed a pretty significant spike in CPU usage when my IDE was opening up. I’ve also observed an amd graphics pop up briefly appear while starting everything back up after my laptop’s crashed trying to start what’s supposed to be a pretty low demand productivity game. Could I reasonably expect getting the external GPU to pretty much resolve this issue?
I guess the AMD popup showing all the graphics bells and whistles set to minimum when starting all my programs back up made me think it might be vRAM related somehow, but Virtual Cottage 2 only asks for “GRAPHICS: Videocard with at least 512MB” in the specs. It happens when I’m starting the program. Plus there was watching my CPU usage shoot up to 90-something% while starting MATLAB. It should come as no surprise that I don’t really understand the difference in how memory is handled between integrated graphics vs. discrete.
Theres a bios setting that let’s you increase the amount of ram dedicated to the iGPU. Setting that higher should get rid of that vram popup, though the game should work fine anyways.
A bigger GPU won’t help reduce your CPU usage in MATLAB.