XPS 15 9550 not switching to NVIDIA card while gaming

Hi there,

I received my XPS 15 9550, i7, 16mb RAM, 512 SSD a couple of days ago. I had a couple of issues which others have had, too. Upon its second boot, there was an error message the hard drive not being installed. Then, the Intel display driver began intermittently crashing. The first error message hasn't appeared since, and I made the regedit fix outlined here which fixed the display driver issue. At that point, things seemed to be stable.

I was able to play Blizzard's "Overwatch" with between 50-70fps on Medium settings. However, today, for some reason, I'm only getting 20-30 fps on Medium settings in the same game. I assume this to mean that the game is attempting to use the integrated graphics card, and not the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960m card.

Also, even when the game was running at 50 - 70 fps, whenever the game started the screen would flash multiple times (maybe 3-4 times over five seconds), which I took to mean that the computer was switching to using the NVIDIA card. That same flashing occurs now...except I end up with 20-30 fps from what I presume is the integrated graphics card.

Any thoughts on what might be going wrong here, or how I can fix it?

 

I think there was a minor patch to overwatch yesterday or today.

In any case, the problem is that you are running into an Optimus Whitelist issue. Google that term, and it will tell you how to manually tell your computer to use the Geforce GPU for a specific EXE

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

Thanks, Kent. You're right about the patch. It's possible that something shifted there, and that the problem is with Overwatch and not any settings on my end. I googled Optimus Whitelist, followed the instructions, and saw that Overwatch is already being prompted to use the Geforce GPU. As a test, I actually told it to use the integrated graphics card instead...and then I was getting FPS of 10-15. So, it looks like it IS still using the Geforce GPU by default...it's just that the frame rate died for some (as yet) undetermined reason.

I checked the Blizzard Overwatch forums and didn't see anyone else reporting and frame rate issues like I'm experiencing with the new patch. Hrm!

 

So, uh, I figured out the problem. My laptop wasn't plugged in...and I guess running off of battery (or, at least, the default power setting on battery) capped the fps at 30.

!

Thread closed!

 

Lol.

This is why the first questions out on any tech support script are
Is it plugged in?
Did you try rebooting?

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

Yup! Hooray for embarassment!

 

Are you even sure you are really using the 960M and not the Integrated GFX card?

I know you said its working now but do a quick test and force it to play on Integrated and then the Nvidea and see if there is a difference in the FPS...