Make sure your laptop is recognizing the right video card!

[Allen Brown]

I had my laptop custom built by Sager. Very high performance machine, 3 hard drives (1 SSD), 16GB Ram, I7, and a GeForce GTX 680M video card, to name a few highlights. After working with it for 6-8 months, and not that happy with the render capabilities, I went to preferences>video card status (I think that's what it was called), and noticed Chief was using "Intel HD 4000" as a video card. That's the "on-board" video card built into the motherboard. I called tech services, and they said it was not Chief deciding which card to use, but the laptop. They gave me some ideas to try, & I figured it out. I clicked the start button, found the Chief Architect folder, found X5, right clicked on it, and got the option to choose which video card to use. (I don't get that option on my desktop, just my laptop. Must be because my laptop has two video cards, and my desktop doesn't)

Greatly improved my performance. (Wish I knew about that 6 months ago!)

[MarkMc]

If you go between the 32 and 64 bit versions be sure to set both. Also accessible from nVidia control panel where you can control some specifiics. Every now and then Win (8) power settings take over too so I've set those all to max performance to avoid the intel card (which is the cause AFAIK)