What Is a MUX Switch in a Gaming Laptop?
If you have looked for a new gaming laptop recently, there is a good chance you have come across a “MUX switch.” Here’s why it matters and how you can find whether a laptop has a MUX switch.
Most modern gaming laptops have two graphics processors or GPUs—-integrated GPU (iGPU) and discrete GPU (dGPU). The iGPU is a part of the CPU, whereas the dGPU is an additional graphics chip that is more powerful than iGPU but consumes far more power. So to balance battery life and graphics performance, the gaming laptops switch between the iGPU and dGPU on the fly. This switching is performed by Optimus (also known as MSHybrid) on laptops with NVIDIA GPU and by Switchable Graphics feature on laptops with AMD GPU.
Although Optimus and its AMD equivalent are beneficial in ensuring the consumers get the best of both the dGPU performance and iGPU battery life, they are not perfect. For example, even when Optimus triggers the dGPU for a graphically intensive task, like a video game, the content rendered by the dGPU is passed through the iGPU. In this approach, the iGPU can become a bottleneck and lead to performance and latency overhead.
To fix the iGPU bottleneck, the gaming laptop manufacturers have introduced the MUX or multiplexer switch.
The MUX switch lets consumers enable or disable the iGPU, thus allowing them to route all graphics rendering directly from the dGPU to the laptop display when needed. Although this severely impacts the laptop’s battery life, it provides a significant performance increase and lowers latency in games.
The multiplexer switch is a microchip on the laptop’s motherboard, which physically changes the connection between dGPU and the display, and it’s accompanied by software that allows consumers to communicate
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