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Are you just running and AMD CPU with integrated graphics, or do you also have a dedicated graphics card? From what I can gather online, the DRI_PRIME variable is mostly used for render offloading to a dedicated GPU, but your question appears to be about iGPUs.
You can also try to manually enable hardware decoding in VLC’s settings. Just go to Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs and choose VA-API (AMD’s preferred standard).
do you also have a dedicated graphics card?
Yes, rx 7800 xt
My worry s that playing a 1080P video need 30 watts (assuming amdgpu_top is not wrong), I would like to move that workload to integrated GPU, which I enabled in BIOS.
Thank you for your answer, I can confirm by switching to VA-API it lowers my power usage by a lot (from 45 to 20~21 watts reported).
Do you have a dedicated GPU¿?
Yes, rx 7800 xt. I can confirm DRI_PRIME does switch to integrated GPU on demand
DRI_PRIME=0 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Graphics (gfx1101, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 6.5.5-arch1-1)
DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon Graphics (raphael_mendocino, LLVM 16.0.6, DRM 3.54, 6.5.5-arch1-1)
Which distro are you using. Fedora, manjaro and few others disabled hardware acceleration for certain codecs making CPU and power spike. For Fedora you can enable RPM fusion and install the hardware acceleration versions and be back to normal .
One thing you could do is plugging your monitor straight into the iGPU outputs and using DRI_PRIME only for applications that need the powerful dGPU.
Unless you want to run either everything or nothing on a specific GPU, I don't think there's a more convenient way than setting DRI_PRIME per application.