Optimus query.

[drillerman46]

Been playing around with my new notebook and would ask for some advice on how the Optimus tech works. According to the supplement that came with the notebook the "VGA" button lights orange when in Optimus mode. Thing is, it always seems to stay in Optimus mode even when I press the "VGA" button. ie, pressing the button does nothing. Also, when I play borderlands is switches to "discrete GPU" like it should but when I play Medieval total war 2 it doesn't. It always stays on "Integrated GPU". Why?

 

[drillerman46]

ok, been playing around a bit more now. The VGA button in the top left hand corner of the laptop seems to do nothing! Also having "gadgets" on your desktop seems to send the the optimus tecnology into a state of confusion, flipping between integrated and dedicated all the time. I have found the best way to manage the graphics cards at the moment is stipulating "Global integrated graphics" through the nvidia control panel and then individually applying your perfomance settings for each game "exe" through the same panel. This seems to work. One example was MTW2: when I started the game it would only use the integrated card, so I had to tell it to use the dedicated card through the nvidia control panel.
All in all I'm not sure I like the optimus tech at the moment or it actually works as intended and I can forsee problems in the future, don't know why, just doesn't feel quite right yet.
Anyone else got any comments about optimus?

 

[skakruk]

I have the Optimus I laptop. The thing is - till I installed the Hotkey AP (it comes on the cd PCS provided) the optimus button did nothing. Once you install it however you will be able to force your laptop into UMA mode (a power plan is automatically created if you are using windows and the button goes green). It seems Hotkey AP also displays changes in volume and what devoces you switch on/off in the top left corner of the screen, kinda neat.

I assign games and programms to use nvidia instead of intel through the nvidia panel too. It seems things older than 2006 may require this quick operation.
The only way I have found to confuse my optimus (yellow to green blinking) is by starting a monitoring program (temperature or state) and then shutting down the application that has been using the nvidia GPU. It seems that the monitor keeps getting information about the nvidia but you are now using the intel graphics.