My phone is Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact which has Adreno 540 as gpu. My laptop's gpu is NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 4GB which seems to be much worse than my phone's gpu. My PC's OS is Ubuntu 16.04.
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$\begingroup$ In what way is your laptop GPU worse? It's a higher-performance part and should work much better. $\endgroup$– Dan HulmeAug 13, 2018 at 8:51
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$\begingroup$ Any 3D games look much better on my phone than on my PC. $\endgroup$– gerasAug 13, 2018 at 8:57
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$\begingroup$ Could you be more specific? Do they have better framerate, higher resolution, or something else? Are you using the open-source drivers on your laptop or NVidia's drivers? $\endgroup$– Dan HulmeAug 13, 2018 at 9:00
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$\begingroup$ It depends on the settings. For example if I set the same resolution the frame rate on my phone seems better. I tried both open-source and Nvidia drivers and it didn't seem to make a big difference. Anyway, for the sake of argument we can assume my computer doesn't have any dedicated graphics card. Is it possible to use my phone's gpu as an external one for my pc? $\endgroup$– gerasAug 13, 2018 at 16:10
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$\begingroup$ Almost certainly no. The amount of latency and bandwidth bottleneck would render it too slow to be usable. I don't think there exists software to proxy a GPU over USB or WIFI or whatever communication channel your phone has available. $\endgroup$– PaulHKAug 14, 2018 at 3:50
2 Answers
No. Your phone's GPU is in one chip with the CPU, some of the memory, and its display controller, and they're all tightly integrated together. Also, there'd be no way to connect it efficiently to the laptop. Only the latest generation of USB and Thunderbolt have enough bandwidth to be even worth considering for external GPUs, and even then, they're only used with dedicated hardware at the GPU end of the link - not a general-purpose processor. Apart from the fundamental problems, there's the very practical issue that your PC doesn't have any drivers for the GPU on the phone.
I know mobile GPUs are pretty effective, but if your phone's GPU seems faster than the Nvidia chip in your laptop, there's something wrong with your laptop. If you can give more information on the problem to the people at Ask Ubuntu, they can probably help with that.
Your phone would have to do all of the CPU processing too then beam it to your laptop using scrcpy: https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy