Solved! Laptop is using Intel Integrated Graphics instead of GTX 820M?

virtualflying

Commendable
Mar 18, 2016
6
0
1,520
Hello all

I got a laptop from one of those "Unclaimed Baggage" stores, and it has an i5-4210u, GTX 820M, and 6GB RAM. It isn't the best, but I have a really good PC at home so this was mostly for school.

Well, I was looking at my specs, and in task manager I have 2 Graphics tabs: One of them with 2% is named "Intel HD Graphics Family" while the other, with 0% load, is named "NVIDIA GeForce 820M".

Is this normal? I've heard that sometimes laptops switch between iGPU and the dGPU.
 
Solution
What were you doing on your laptop when you were checking GPU utilization? If you were just idling at the desktop, it would be expected that it's using the iGPU (assuming it has switchable graphics). Try running a GPU benchmark like unigine heaven and look at utilization then.

TJ Hooker

Honorable
Apr 15, 2014
199
0
10,710
What were you doing on your laptop when you were checking GPU utilization? If you were just idling at the desktop, it would be expected that it's using the iGPU (assuming it has switchable graphics). Try running a GPU benchmark like unigine heaven and look at utilization then.
 
Solution
G

Guest

Guest
There is nothing wrong, the Intel GPU is the default one because it uses less power (so the battery lasts longer).

Use Nvidia Control Panel to assign the more powerful Nvidia 820M GPU to each game or graphics application that you install.

You only need to do it once, those games & apps will then automatically use the 820M GPU every time you fire them up.

Setting up the 820M GPU as the default for everything is a bad idea because it isn't always required and it will just run down the battery quicker.