Solved! After reinstalling factory settings my VRAM and possibly my graphics card are no longer retaining the same memory.

[Rileyas1078]

I purchased an ASUS G750J laptop a couple of years ago and still have the box that says I should have 2GB of VRAM. I reinstalled factory settings and under Screen Resolution Advanced Settings it says that I have Total Available Graphics Memory of 1792 MB and Dedicated Video Memory of 32MB.

This doesn't seem right to me but I'm not an expert on the subject. It also says I have an Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600 adapter. Not sure if that should be the GeForce GTX 860M as the label or if those are two unrelated things.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[hang-the-9]

The memory in your 860M can't change, it's built in. The Intel graphics use the system RAM and that can change depending on the BIOS and driver settings. 2 GB will not be exactly 2 GB, the available memory looks right.

 

[Rileyas1078]

You're the tech, but Megabytes seems like a far cry from Gigabytes. It states on the box that I have 2GB of VRAM, not RAM. Also, what was running without difficulty before is no longer running as well with no other changes but the reinstallation of factory settings.

 

[hang-the-9]

You're the tech, but Megabytes seems like a far cry from Gigabytes. It states on the box that I have 2GB of VRAM, not RAM. Also, what was running without difficulty before is no longer running as well with no other changes but the reinstallation of factory settings.

A Gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. 1792 MB is just about 2 GB. VRAM is Video RAM, that video ram is used by your 860M, the Intel card uses your "RAM" that is shared with the rest of the system. Your nVidia card may not be installed properly, is it showing up in Device Manager? You may need to go to the display options and set the nVidia card to be used as the main card, they may change what you see.

 

[Rileyas1078]

Let me put this into perspective. Previously I had Skyrim running well with it only crashing twice in a month long run. It had all the DLCs, the Unofficial patch, an Audio patch, two monster addons, a water patch, the major cities upgraded, a hand full of others along with my personal mod and Skyrim Mesh Enhancement and heavy textures.

Now I can barely get it to run anything beyond the meshes and textures.

 

[Peter Martin]

use a system restore point to return to when it was operating well. maybe an update got you.

 

[Rileyas1078]

I was unaware there was a response already when I typed my last message and then my battery died on NY phone.

I have pulled up Device Manager and under Display Adapters it lists both Intel and NVidia. The NVidia, under Location, says

PCI bus 1. device 0. function 0.

Is that correct? I will look at it and try Googling some information and hope for a response.

 

[smorizio]

look at you bios. the intel ipgpu is used to save battery life. see if the bios or windows is using it now as the default video card.

 

[Rileyas1078]

Thank you, this helped me narrow my search and figure out what to question Google on. It is working beautifully now.

For anyone having similar problems:

I opened the NVidia Control Panel
Under Manage 3D Settings
Program Settings
1. Select a program to customize:
Click Add

Find the .exe program you wish to dedicate that the graphics card run on (mine was set on an optional whatever it felt like which happened to be the lower performing Intel card.) If the .exe is not listed, as mine was not, click Browse and find it wherever it is located.

2. Select the preferred graphics processor for this program:

In my case I selected the High performance NVidia processor.

Click Apply.

That's it. Thanks again, and while it wouldn't have helped, thank you Peter for attempting to help and offering any suggestions.