Yes, it works, and yes, it requires drivers, but those are readily available as I understand it. Some of the Linux laptops the OP mentioned do have discrete graphics cards (Oryx, for example, has an Nvidia card; for clarity, like all of System76's computers it comes with Linux).

As I understand it, if you are willing to run proprietary code you can sometimes get better drivers. I would be fine with that, personally, but not everyone agrees. ("Proprietary" refers to availability of source code - some drivers are free-as-in-cost but not open source, and you might have worse performance with open source drivers. This might just be Nvidia, or it might be AMD/Intel too.)