Alienware M17x r3 and GTA

I bought GTA EFLC and installed it and for some reason it is only using my intel card rather than my GTX 460m. Any ides on how to fix this?
intel i7 2720QM
6 GB DDR3 Ram
Nvidia GTX 460m

 

wait, im confused, what do you mean by its only using your intel card, because you just wrote down your ram, CPU, and GPU, although i did see that on an m11 with an nvidia card,

there may be an option to switch between graphics. though i dont know for sure on an r3

 

When i go to settings it only has 58mb of video memory and when i run the benchmark it says that the video card is "intel HD graphics family"

 

i cant tell you exactly where but somewhere in the nvidia control pannel you can set which programs should use the 460.....add that program

 

thats the funny thing i already did and STILL it refuses to use the card

 

mmm then id say reinstall the drivers. when i ran into a problem with enabling my xfire, i reinstalled the drivers along with CCC and that fixed it.

 

Do u mean my video card drivers cause ive done that twice already. What is a CCC. And thank you to both of both trying got more help here in 20 min than 3 hours on the phone with dell.

 

CCC = Catalyst control center, that's for ATI cards, you have an NVIDIA card, the similar panel is called NVIDIA Control Panel

 

CCC is the ATI drivers..if you have an nvidia card, ignore that...have you tried turrning optimus off completely and see if it works....

 

Sorry for being such a noob but where do i update my control panel.

 

sorry, should have specified, yes, basically uninstall your nvidia control panel and the video drivers for your card and t]do a clean install of the latest drivers. that will probably fix it.

you should be able to go to the control panel and there should be a update button

if you dont find that, then go the the nvidia website, or, go the old fashioned way and search "update" on your computer

 

not sure if this helps but i tried installing the latest patch manually and after it was done caused the game to crash

 

@3demons - won't fix his issue, you can't upgrade using stock drivers on Dell. INF would have to be modded.

 

really? you mean updating Nvidia drivers? does this apply only to Nvidia?

edit: i did that to my drivers, atleast when i updated them, it took my to the ATi drivers website and did it all itself, i didnt know if Nvidia had the same thing.

 

you mean you manually updated the drivers? or you updated the game?

 

I am sure he meant the game's patches GTA4 was always kinda iffy on PC, however, since I *FINALLY* have a 2GB card that can unlock GTA4's max textures I will be trying that as soon as I can...

Also, it's just NVIDIA specific, ATI isn't anal like that.

 

heh, thanks for the info, i never knew that.

 

Its a known Optimus issue. Its part of the reason why I've been avoiding Optimus for now.

Optimus problem still exists with 257.15 - NVIDIA Forums

Basically your GTX460 is on a layer "under" your IGP; some applications have no idea its there. Hopefully Nvidia releases a driver to Dell to fix it :\

 

Thank you very much for the info. Guess i have to play the waiting game.....

 

ugh this is EXACTLY why we need BIOS options for optimus/AMD equivalent. In case something like this happens, we can force it to use one GPU or another. Hopefully, dell releases a better bios with the options to mess with GPU settings.

 

Unfortunately that's not possible through the bios. Nvidia Optimus requires that the IGP be running.

It looks like this:

GPU > IGP > Display

If you were to somehow force the GPU as the defaut, it would do you no good since its not even connected to the display.

Fortunately for AMD users, we have "dumb" gpu switching. Both cards are connected to the screen, but we lose the fancy pants Optimus "seamless" swtiching.

I'll take dumb please.

 

I posted a topic earlier this week about how GTA$ does not recognize the 460 using from command line things i was able to get the video memory up. Only problem now it when i first launch the game it will run fine but 2 minutes in it will drop down to 10fps and never go back up

 

I figured out the problem that you are having, since i had the exact same one.. Uhm to explain as clearly as possible



Go into the NVIDIA control pannel go to manage 3D settings and set preferred graphics card to High-performance NVIDIA Processor and do this for the global and program setting tabs in that section..

Then set the PhysX processor to GeForce GTX 460M

Finally set the video color and Image settings to "use the NVIDIA setting" for every bubble..


This seemed to help drastically with me, its worth the trouble i went through for 2.5 hours of messing with my comp, Epic fustration Dell is lame.. But im sure you'll be as happy as i was with the results.. Best of luck.. Hope i helped

 

well since the post is generically M17X and GTA,
can i ask all those who run the 6970M and the 2720QM.....

-what drivers are you all running the game
-and if possible the list of the settings u have in the game please.....i am having stutterer issues like you wouldn't believe......

 

If you would like to run off just the nvidia card instead of the annoying optimus system, try this out.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7678603-post107.html

I should warn you, using the modified bios will not be covered by warranty if you decide to use it. It will enable you to update to the latest drivers and such, but it's not officially covered by dell yet.

The positive is that any game you have should run off the nvidia card after you do this. Just remember there is risks to using a modified bios.