Is it possible to assign GPUs to boot options?

If your BIOS/UEFI supports it, sure. But most of them default to either an onboard card or whatever you have plugged in, at the lowest level.

Switching display adapters is typically handled at an OS level.

Oh, you mean via grub or something don't you? That, I couldn't say, but somehow doubt.

Lemme crack into the Archwiki and do some research.

…On second thought, I'm not even sure where I'd start.

My last PC I bought 6 years ago had what I consider to have been a pretty good run for its money, considering it cost about €700 at the time. All I did was upgrade the RAM to it's maximum 6GB and install two better graphics cards over time.

Finally took the plunge and bought a Lenovo Legion last week, i5-8400 with 8gb RAM and a GTX 1050 (3gb). I already had an Nvidia GTX 1060 (6gb) graphics card I'd managed to get for a good price a month or so ago, which I've used instead. That'll probably do me fine for another several years, as far as I'm concerned.

It runs everything I want very well, much more efficient for power usage and far less fan noise. That said, I've not really got that many games that could be considered graphics intensive. Witcher 3 runs on pretty much the highest settings without really pushing the system and looks beautiful. Bugs and poor optimisation aside, Kingdom Come: Deliverance runs very well and noticeably much smoother than my previous rig. Dying Light also looks great and runs smoothly.

Those are perhaps the recent-ish three most graphics intensive games I play, as most of what's out or coming soon, even with impressive looking visuals, hasn't really grabbed my interest. No doubt I'll buy Cyberpunk 2077 when that's out, but at least I'll have a rig capable of running it pretty smoothly, or at least I hope so!

That said, part of my decision when it comes to buying games is whether they're released on GOG. If they're packed with DRM shite, I ain't buying, however impressive they look visually.

Do you mean a Lenovo Legion Cube?

And isn't that a 2GB 1050 it came with? I don't recall them ever making a 3GB version, but I could be wrong.

^ That's actually part of the problem. In theory x86 consoles means "easier porting" to x86 PC's. In practise, half the developers are so incredibly lazy it often means no real porting at all, (they'll just compile the PC version "100% optimised for console" with zero effort). Chronic industry-wide laziness is also the same reason why devs regularly can't be bothered to add keyboard rebinding options for the PC release (despite even +25 year old 1MB MS-DOS games managing just fine and it being something so simple it typically takes 1x half-competent coder less than 1x hour of work)...

Personally, I'm done with the "buy high end hardware to try and brute force through badly made cr*p" rat-race. When I see Unity Engine trash on Steam that looks like something out of 1996-2000 yet runs 1/3 the speed of 2012 UE3 games, or a game comes with dumb key-bindings and no rebind option, then I just don't buy. Same goes for DRM saturated Ubisoft AAA garbage that "needs" a 6-core CPU (4x cores for the game and 1.5-2x for the multi-layered Denuvo + VMProtect).

What's really needed is a simplified "idiot proof" cross-platform engine for lighter weight Indie games (something like a modern UE2-3) with all the default presets pre-tweaked for performance, options menu's pre-designed, etc, and "good enough" graphics that aren't trying too hard to be the next CryEngine. Unity 5 has a long way to go before it reaches that goal.

It's not the Cube, it's the Lenovo Legion Y520. For some reason the front reminds me of the Cylons out of Battlestar Galactica.

This is the model I bought from MediaMarkt.

Worth noting that even in big superstores like MediaMarkt, it's worth haggling... Price on their site says €999 but I paid €800 after a little careful negotiation with the section manager in the store ;)

My mistake too regarding the graphics card it came with. It was actually a GTX 1060 3gb, but as I already had an ASUS GTX 1060 6gb, I used that instead.

I see, it's the full-sized desktop Legion. Forgot about those.

Ok, now it makes sense :).

Regarding performance, yes, a 1060 6GB sure is more than enough for 1080p gameplay with little to no compromise on all modern titles except perhaps a few exotic or poorly optimized ones.

In fact I've played all the games you've mentioned on a 1050 Ti which is about 50% slower and only had to tune down a couple of things to get it wheezing at 60fps, but I'm one of those apparently rare people who don't mind one bit to having shadows on medium and AA on FXAA :).

Quite honestly, I've never really been that bothered about graphics, so long as I enjoy the gameplay of what I'm playing. That said, obviously getting to enjoy something like Witcher 3 with even better settings is always a bonus.

Mostly what motivated me with the new PC purchase was something that would "do me" for the next five or six years, for what I considered to be a reasonable price, like my last machine. I've always been tempted to go down the route of building my own, or choosing each component and getting someone to build it, but in the end I always end up with something off the shelf (so to speak) and then upgrade slightly a few years down the line.

Hard to say, as it doesn't even have an official release date at this point. You should be able to play it on your GPU, but how well it's going to run is anyone's guess. It's going to be released on the current consoles too, right? A GTX 1060 is more performant than most of them, so you should be OK.

Worse still is when you have games gimped massively for dumb things like console parity, as what infamously happened to DOG_DOGS.

You're right that half-assed ports of console versions are a big part of the problem, but I don't think it comes down to developers being lazy. The real problem is, that most devs no longer care for the games they work on. Indie devs are generally passionate about their game projects, but for AAA productions you have teams consisting of hundreds of artists and programmers, all of which only contribute a tiny part to the final product, and most of them have no say regarding major game design decisions. There's no strong connection with the project they're working on, and as soon as the game is released, most of them are kicked out and the publisher hires a new team for the next game. Often the PC ports aren't even done by the same developer team. So you got a large number of people who only slave away to earn their paycheck, with no attachment to the product they're working on. It's completely different from the small-scale dev teams of the 80s or 90s, or modern day Indie devs. There's also an extra incentive for Indie devs to deliver quality and continued support for their game after release, because that's how they earn their money. For a hired dev from a AAA team, they generally have no incentive to give a fuck once the game is out and their job is done, especially if they didn't enjoy the experience working for EA, Ubisoft or some other big publisher.

I wonder, is PC exclusive AAA gaming a thing? Seems like we mostly just get the leftovers from the consoles. I forgot, was Kingdom Come: Deliverance PC exclusive? Seems the best we get are "AA" games, or niché genres which don't really work on consoles.
I wonder if our evil overlords, such as Microsoft, even want PC gaming to be successful, at least not outside of their own little walled gardens. All of the aspects of PC gaming which are beneficial to the end user, such as the freedom to customize hardware and software, are not within Microsoft's interests. They'd rather have maximum control over the things we buy and how we use them, so their kek-box must seem much more appealing from their point of view.

To be honest, Microsoft confuses me. I know some of it has to do with upper management, but with how often they promise to support PC gaming and then…don't, is astonishing, to say the least. At least the Microsoft store is still dead.

I doubt current-gen mobos have this capability. Fortunately, I still have my old PC, so I'll switch it over to an AMD config and I should be good to go.