I’d definitely swap as many parts in/out as possible before buying new stuff. Besides, you might end up finding out something just became unseated or unplugged - it happens over time. Just have some thermal paste handy before you start swapping CPUs.
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.
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.
You may want to ask over in !datahoarder . This topic often came up back on Reddit, and the general vibe I got was that most people prefer QuickSync. Intel may not be great in a lot of areas, but they are a beast in video encoding/decoding. That being said, I use a Ryzen APU and it’s perfectly fine. There are way more important things to look at when choosing a CPU.
If your performance is slow, I would check your CPU is listed on the chart I linked above. Not all CPUs support all codecs.
Edit: If your CPU doesn’t support the codec, it will still work, it just won’t be accelerated.