Laptop dedicated gpu failure?

[Stefan Basangeac]

I've already been trying to search for a solution or an explanation for the past few days, so I'm sorry if somehow my incompetence missed this issue being answered somewhere else. So here's the deal:

I have a laptop, a Lenovo v570, with an Nvidia GeForce 540M on it. The laptop also has a switch-button thingy that switches between gpu modes. In one case, I'm assuming it uses strictly the intel card, since in the nvidia control panel the "preferred graphics processor" is grayed out and stuck on "integrated graphics". In the second case, I'm allowed to choose between integrated and nvidia and I'm also able to run applications with the nvidia graphics processor from the context menu.

However, if I have the nvidia gpu selected as my preferred porcessor or if I try to directly run an app with it, literally -no- application that uses the gpu will start. They either crash with unknown errors or simply don't do anything. If I keep the laptop switch on the first case (mentioned above) everything works fine, but obviously not with the right gpu.

This is a fresh windows 8.1 setup with all drivers up to date so I have no idea what's going on, cause I've never had this issue before.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

For the GPU switching, you generally need the laptop-specific GPU drivers - normal Nvidia ones aren't enough.

You'll need to go to Lenovo's website.