XPS 15 L502 missing menus from NVIDIA Control Panel

Hey all, I received my XPS 15 on Friday and have been playing with it for a couple of days. I've put a couple of games on it that I would like to run at a non-native resolution and in doing so, realized that I lack the option to adjust display scaling from the NVIDIA Control panel (i.e. if running the game at 1280x1024, center it on the screen with black bars left and right instead of stretching it).

I checked NVIDIA's site for the newest drivers but their little tool said that I would have to get custom drivers from Dell's site. What gives? The only menus that I have in the NVIDIA Control Panel are '3D Settings' and 'Video'. What happened to the rest of them?

 

You have two options. First, you could try laptopvideo2go.com and see if someone has posted a driver for you yet. It may not be available just because the card is so new. Second, you could download the mobile drivers on the nVIDIA web site, extract the files, and modify the INF to match your card. I don't know if there are instructions out there to do this. I would also check out the other thread on using nVIDIA stock drivers for the previous generation card.

 

There's a registry edit that will allow you to use custom resolutions. I'm not sure where I saw it in these forums, but there is a bunch of information on it via google.

Assuming the game you want to play supports the resolution you add to the registry.

 

Thanks for the tips. So Dell's drivers lack basic functionality such as display scaling for example? This is my first Dell and I guess I should have done more research but that sucks. I used to have an Asus laptop with an ATI X1700 and I had to jump through a ton of hoops and modify drivers whenever I wanted to install the most recent ones directly from ATI. I was hoping to avoid exactly this sort of thing. Is there a chance that Dell's future drivers will add more functionality?

 

Did some digging and found it. The laptop in question has an ati card though, so maybe it's not possible with the nvidia gpu and the optimus drivers. Still worth a look.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/560486-custom-resolution-900p-1080p-screen.html

 

The problem here isn't custom resolution. The problem is how the chosen display size is shown on the screen.

I don't know about that, I was just assuming from your first comment.

My experience with Dell has been that their graphics drivers are fully functional and identical to what you get from nVIDIA. However, Dell rarely, if ever, updates the drivers on their site so after a few years you are probably far behind the latest. For most components, this isn't an issue as you can go directly to the manufacturer's site. However, it would appear that Dell continues to use custom graphics card identifiers that make updating drivers a real pain.

I don't know why Dell insists on this (they'd probably argue that it decreases support costs), but it was only their support for high resolution displays that kept this obnoxious behavior from being a deal breaker.

 

I remember reading that, I wonder if you would be able to apply the same method on the L502x to get a 900p res...
Maybe someone can try it, or someone who knows what they are doing can use a similar method and let the rest of us know how to do it.

 

Sorry, I reread the post and realized is was the scaling that was missing, not the custom resolution. I promise to read better next time.