Changing Graphics on Vaio Z

I recently got a new Vaio Z that I'll be using as a college laptop for pretty much everything, and I found while playing around with it that it's possible to play games on the Intel GMA graphics as well as the 330M GPU.

I'm hoping to get something working on it to ease gaming woes - because it comes with two GPUs and both can play some of my games (like WoW), I'd like to be able to have the laptop detect the GPU being used when I load the game and choose out of two graphics settings depending on which it is. For example, if I load WoW with the "Stamina" option because my lappy's unplugged, I'd like the graphics to be set to the bare minimums - if the "Speed" option because I don't have to worry about the battery, I'd like them to be set at around the maximum.

I realize this is a rather specific problem, and that any general solution would probably need to do it separately for every program (shared GPU detection, but finding the files where graphics configurations are stored is different for different programs), so I don't really expect it - but if anyone knows of a program that would allow me to do this, it would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

I highly doubt this is possible and it would have to be implemented inside the game itself.

 

This sounds like Optimus.

Theres a hacked driver around in this forum that supports it, but I think you get a watermark of some sort and it breaks some other features in the laptop.

 

No what he is saying is when he has the laptop in stamina mode he wants the game to automatically detect that and put the graphics settings to minimal and vice-versa speed = jack up the settings.

 

You can do this for most games through a script that checks which graphics card is in use, and then copies the relevant config file to the real game config, and after the game is finished, to the backup location.

First, manually copy the gameconfig.ini (or whatever it's named) to gameconfig.INTEL and gameconfig.NVIDIA. Then make a script, something like:

Code:

; Your own routine for checking which card is in use goes here.
; It's doable, I just don't remember the details off the top of my head.
if %GFX%=NVIDIA
   copy /Y gameconfig.NVIDIA gameconfig.ini
   .\rungame
   copy /Y gameconfig.ini gameconfig.NVIDIA
else
  copy /Y gameconfig.INTEL gameconfig.ini
  .\rungame
  copy /Y gameconfig.ini gameconfig.INTEL
endif

For some games, you may have to copy an entire directory and not a file. It depends on the game.

If the game stores its config in the registry, it's still doable, but a lot more work.

 

Don't many games have the "Automatically Detect" option for having the game detect the best settings for GPU? Could you use that depending on what graphics option you have selected (speed or stamina)? I don't know if that makes a difference, as I am still awaiting my Z (been two months now).

 

Thanks, Arth. I thought it might be something light that; that looks even more simple than I expected, so I'll go and try to figure out how I'd do that. If you could give a simple walk-through for implementing it, that's be nice. I believe I found the config file (at least for WoW, which is what I'm focusing on because it's the one game I've found that can be played on Intel but is best on NVidia. The others either don't play on Intel or play perfectly) - how would I go about implementing that code?

JP, I play some outdated games, and of the "newer" ones, WoW doesn't.