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#11
One would think with the term "switchable graphics" that you would be switching from one card to another but that's not what happens in this generation hardware. The switching in almost all laptops is more closely related to the turning on and off of a hybrid Xfire or sli system.
The laptop display will always be fed by the integrated card. When Gaming or doing other demanding tasks the discrete card is enabled to help. Depending on the Make and Model the external monitors will work the same way (Mostly) though it is possible on some laptops to feed with the discrete card only. With My G780 "Gremlin" Intel-NVidia I'd start the Game on the laptop display before plugging in the external monitor set to extend, then drag to the external and close the laptop lid. I'm still not sure the Intel GPU shuts down completely, but the CPU temps ran lower ?? I might install Win 10 on a spare SSD one day just to test since it has GPU in task manager.
If you boot into "BIOS" you'll see the only two settings are "Switchable" and "Integrated Only" It's extremely rare to find one that's capable of discrete only. Note: I'm not up-to-date with the latest hardware though.
So when updating Drivers it's recommended you always update the integrated card before updating the discrete card.
Hopefully I was able to translate from Cajun to Murrican good enough for the OP to understand.