How to fix steam overlay being slow, library discussions being choppy and steam taking significantly longer to load using the shortcut rather than the corner icon.

[byemax]

I've made this as easy to search as possible because these issues are such a pain, though with this simple setting change (god I sound like a salesman) you can fix them in minutes.

A quick brief: This issue is caused by internal graphics being enabled, if you're like most people and you have a gpu, the integrated graphics will probably be turned on if you've built your pc yourself.

Symptoms

• A slow ingame overlay, the overlay itself freezing at times (an example being when opening the overlay browser)
  
• Slow and choppy scrolling on activity posts in the library
  
• Opening steam while steam is running via the shortcut taking a long time whereas using the bottom right corner steam icon by right clicking is instant.

Diagnosis: Making sure this issue is caused by this specific setting.

Open task manager and go to performance, if you have two GPUs present (usually GPU 1 is your actual GPU and GPU 0 is your integrated graphics with either the motherboard company in the name or some gibberish with underscores) then the integrated graphics are likely causing this issue.
You can also see this in Device Manager under Display Adapters, I do not recommend disabling the integrated adapter as some people have said it could be a bad decision if the GPU fails, from unrelated issues of course.

How to solve

Before proceeding, make sure your monitor(s) are plugged into your GPU and not motherboard.

We need to turn off integrated graphics.
We can do that from BIOS:
Open BIOS by restarting your computer and pressing the right key to open the BIOS. If your pc loads too quickly for that, open a cmd prompt and use "shutdown /r /fw" and wait, your pc will restart and will open BIOS by itself. To find out how to disable your integrated BIOS, search online as I will not be listing how to do it. Though if you have the same case as I do, aka have a gigabyte motherboard, I had to go into IO Ports found in settings, and disabled it from there. Do note that after saving and exiting the pc will take a minute or two to restart so fear not, for you have not messed up.

I am not a computer expert, this is purely info I have read online and applied, there are conflicting posts online about the disabling of integrated graphics being either good or bad for the pc, so do this at your own discretion.

[L e X o]

This helped thank you very much.

[Dieter]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.