I have a recurrent issue where I have two graphics cards in my laptop (it's practically a standard for years now). A decent high power card, and a simple low power card maybe integrated into the processor.
When you start an application, one of the two cards will handle that application.
I generally can't my browser with the high power card; probably because browser vendors don't want to sacrifice battery life all of the time for some fancy effects a small slice of the time.
But I'm no expert. Chrome seems to handle things better than Firefox, that's why I still have it.
Out of curiosity, are you running an Nvidia card? (This may apply to radeons as well, but I don't have any experience)... For the NVidia drivers at least, there is an option to select which graphics card to use on a per-application basis. Normally the drivers default to auto-selecting what it thinks is best, but you can override that in cases like this.
When you start an application, one of the two cards will handle that application.
I generally can't my browser with the high power card; probably because browser vendors don't want to sacrifice battery life all of the time for some fancy effects a small slice of the time.
But I'm no expert. Chrome seems to handle things better than Firefox, that's why I still have it.