zlacker

Windows 10 fixed this sometime around the end of 2020, where you have igpu and a discrete - prior to whatever patch they pushed, if you alt tabbed out of a fullscreen game, there was a good chance that the game window would be a 1" square when you alt tabbed back, if it didn't crash in the meantime.

The "black screen for a couple seconds" thing is still there, you just don't notice it, and once a game has "started" the discrete GPU, you can seamlessly switch back and forth.

some people are mentioning that "i can't believe it took 10 years for this to get fixed" - however back in the late 90s this exact scenario was the most common power gaming setup, with 3dfx cards you'd have 3 cards, two 3d cards with SLI, and a 2D card, usually an intel. The same black screen for a couple seconds, and switching between the desktop and a game had the potential to break things.

The "automatic" switching between igpu and discrete was managed on windows before 2011, because i had a laptop with that setup in 2011 and it would detect 3d applications and use the discrete for that, or you could force one gpu or the other, if you wanted.