Laptops with Integrated/Discrete Graphics selecting preferred GPU

How come on my Alienware m15 I can assign some programs to use the nVIDIA Graphics but others not? the option is greyed out for VLC and MPC-HC for example but allows me to select the nVIDIA GPU for Splash Player.

Also for other apps which I don't care about which GPU is using it like the browsers all give me the option to choose which GPU I want but the most important one which is video players are not allowing me to.

 

They may not have necessary routines to use Nvidia decoder (since some people may not have it all or have AMD) and that's fine. There is no need to use Nvidia to decode video on modern laptop at all, CPU is more than enough. re-encoding video is totally different story, using CPU only I was getting few frames a second and even few min video could take hours to encode and this is on 6 core 8750, while Nvidia runs it at over 200FPS. Especially the newest H.265 and VP9 codecs absolutely need hardware acceleration for encoding but playing not so much.

 

Ah I used to have this stupid issue when I used to use MPC-HC w/MadVr. I believe I used nVidia Inspector to force dGPU for those apps. You'll have to do it everytime you update drivers.

 

You can rename the vlc.exe to vlc2.exe file then add that file using "Add" button in control panel, this should allow you to select any GPU. As to why Nvidia does this (they disallow GPU selection for some programs in drivers) - I have no idea, you should email them and ask.