I have a integrated Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 card and a low-mid range dedicated ATI Radeon Topaz R7 M360 card on laptop. My laptop runs on Linux. I am not a serious gamer. Back when I was a kid, I used to play a lot of games. Now due to this lockdown, I have to sit at home and I've time to play those old games I used to play like Super Mario Brothers, Bomberman, Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, Underground 2, etc. So, my games are not demanding.

I've installed Nestopia, Snes9x, PCSXR, Dolphin etc. And I got some ROM dumps from my best friend Robert. I can play games on the emulator. For Nestopia, Snex9x and PCSXR, the frame rate is reasonable, but Dolphin's framerate is very low about 8-20 FPS when I run Need For Speed Underground 2. So, I guess maybe I can utilize my ATI Radeon Topaz R7 M360 card.

So, right now the following packages are installed from my distro's official repo, and my distro maintainers are quick to push the latest and greatest packages.

Something I guess is related is, when I boot to 5.7 kernel, I get an error,
I'm not sure what that error is. I thought it might be relevant. At this point, I'm not sure whether my PC is too potato to emulate Dolphin Need for Speed Underground 2 or my ATI Radeon is not being utilized and is sitting idle. When I run radeontop (which I guess is similar to top or htop but for my GPU), I get Memory and Shader clock at 49.59% usage, VRAM at .07% (2M/2043M), GTT at .47 (14M/2942M) and everything else (Tesselator, Shader Interpolator, etc) is zero, even when running games.

My question is, is my GPU running the games? If not, then how can I run my games on GPU instead of CPU. If yes, then my bad luck. Thank you.

I suppose both GPUs aren't brand-spanking-new? Then Linux should be able to deal with them.
2 GPUs in a laptop usually means some sort of hybrid graphics setup which requires special setup under Linux, too. Keywords are Bumblebee or ... I forget the other one. One was for Nvidia, the other for AMD.
Search your distro's wiki.

On some laptops , if you go into the bios settings , you can select the AMD graphics and disable the Intel. This is superquick and much easier than configuring hybrid graphics. With AMD enabled and Intel disabled your battery will drain faster in an unplugged situation than with a proper hybridized graphic setup, which is important to some people and not important to others. Some people switch to the intel in the bios and don't use graphic intensive apps when they are unplugged to avoid dealing with the more complex hybridized configuration. YMMV.

Hybrid graphics are explained here.

You should see both GPUs with: Then, set DRI_PRIME=0 to use the integrated GPU or DRI_PRIME=1 to use the discrete GPU.
Ed

1 members found this post helpful.

This worked. Thank you.