Game not running on the GPU?

— surely there's a way to override it? somehow?

It's obviously unacceptable to release a game like this that doesn't run well on high-end gaming notebooks.

— surely there's a way to override it? somehow?

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... d-gpu.html

Apparently newer drivers do that but older ones don't, they just released it a few months ago with that mode.

That's NOT a solution, you don't wanna use 1 year old drivers anyway in a gaming setup.

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Battlefield-4/ ... -p/3299839

On the NV forum (which is where you ought to look) this problem is very common, for a lot of games as well. It's their Optimus drivers trying to save power, and its retarded to be frank. My notebooks have been with AMD discrete GPU for awhile and never have a problem with games or anything, I just set it to use the discrete or integrated one and it obeys my command.

Generally though you don't want to release a game that doesn't run out of the box and requires users to troubleshoot. Because optimus handle browsers more strict than actual games, its a bigger problem for us than other games. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_sad.gif" alt=":(" title="Sad">

Currently my games run really quick on integrated Intel GPUs. But I'll keep digging to see if there's an easy/quick fix.

This is nVidia's driver and like my blog post says it's completely ridiculous and their justification makes no sense.

You will simply have to document that if you have a dual GPU system then you may need to specify the powerful GPU in the driver settings/control panel. I think a similar thing happens with dual-GPU AMD setups. I think if the user sets the gaming GPU as the system-wide default though, then that will fix it too. Or you might get the powerful GPU if you're plugged in to charge the battery, since if you're on battery power only it will try hard to save battery.

Just another way that drivers screw games over.

The difference is on AMD notebooks or dual GPU desktops, if you set it to the discrete, it WILL obey.

On NV stuff, through Optimus, NV thinks they KNOW BETTER THAN YOU and will ignore your settings when it feels like it (lots of users complaint on their official forum), and it seems to feel like it more often for browsers.

Just to be sure I understand clearly, NV are nerfing performances on some programs for reasons that are wrong, and WE should work around that?

They did not do a good job, and they choose to do it that way, they are the ones that should do something about that since every workaround you could do would go currently against their decisions and so will be countered everytime until they change it themselves.

I would say complain to them, but do not try to overwrite their choice, not worth it + not your job + you will be supporting a platform that does not try to support you anyway, since they are doing the exact opposite currently.

The thing about game development is that you as the developer are guaranteed to be blamed for poor performance on good machines. This will be a support nightmare.

There doesn't seem to be any way AT ALL to override NVIDIA's cleverness when it comes to nw export.

EDIT: Actually, you CAN override it by taking the same steps to override Chrome. It's a lot of steps to ask of the end user though, and no way to detect when to inform them that they will need to do this.

I thought nVidia only prevented you choosing discrete GPU for browsers, and node-webkit executables were unaffected. As in, a node-webkit export might default to integrated GPU, but you could at least choose discrete GPU for it. The point of my blog post was it wouldn't even let you choose the discrete GPU for browsers! The option would be greyed out. Are you saying it's still greyed out for node-webkit exports as well?

Ashley oh, I see. Chrome wasn't greyed out for me, I was able to manually change the settings for it fine.

So I guess the consensus is it IS possible to override but I still believe it will be a support nightmare.

One idea which comes to mind is to have a 'performance test' built into the game. This is something I'm doing in my current title.

For example, in my game, if you go under options/graphics, there's an option for high/med/low...and auto. Auto will spawn a couple test sequences, testing logic and gpu performance by measuring the fps avrg.

Of course, you could make this transparent by running these tests during downtime (intro sequence, title screen, level loading, etc).

Since you can't directly tell what hardware the game is running on, you have to approximate. Running a logic test -- some sort of arbitrary algorithm, escalate a loop until the fps declines -- and then a graphics test -- spawn sprites and animate them til fps declines -- would give you a measure of the discrepancy between the two. High logic/low gpu could mean iGPU...or it could mean malfunctioning drivers. So, in that case:

'You have integrated graphics don't you? If not, something is wrong...if you have a laptop and a nVidia GPU, you might want to google "nvidia optimus problems".'

PC gaming has always been a PITA...just gotta keep working around it...

Ashley oh, I see. Chrome wasn't greyed out for me, I was able to manually change the settings for it fine.

So I guess the consensus is it IS possible to override but I still believe it will be a support nightmare.

I think it will be ok as long as you are very clear about it in your game site, description or the included Readme.txt etc.

Luckily its true, PC gamers are used to requiring a bit of tweaking, especially with drivers and whatnot. I'm not sure about MAC gamers though. :p