Nvidia Optimus reduces gaming performance

Not all laptops route the external monitor the same. Not sure how it is routed in my current Razer Blade to be honest. I do know that Intel HD drivers can have huge issues with certian driver combinations. resulting into microstutters. Especially prevalent when using an external monitor and switching between duplicate, extended and second screen only screenmodes. With you can only fix by disabling the Intel HD driver and re-enabling it. I wouldnt rule this out that Jarrod was running into a similra issue.

I did run the benchmark yes.

 

Very easy to tell. If the external monitor shows up in Nvidia control panel, then it’s routed to the dGPU.

 

Not always true, even though my monitor shows up, gsync is working etc. It is affected by the Intel drivers. when I disable those, the screen is automatically mirrored, and the stutter bug also appears when the Intel drivers are loaded, even on the external screen. In short, it still affects the system quite a bit. On my ALienware this was not the case, WHen an external monitor was in use, the iGPU drivers wouldnt even show up.

 

The iGPU still drives the internal display if it is enabled. To get rid of the stuttering, set the display output to the external monitor only so that the internal display is disabled.

 

Yeah that is what i mean. I use secondary only. But intel drivers still affect it.

From the 3 recent laptops that i owned, triton 500,alienware 15 r3 and rb15, only the aw15r3 allowed me to use a display port fully outside of the igpu.

 

This happens on any system with 2 GPUs running simultaneously. Happens on desktops as well and it's Windows which handles that behavior.
The stutter is often caused by "reverse-optimus", which is where something on the NV GPU output is being accelerated by the iGPU and copied over, which is a MUCH slower process.

 

Bought Lenovo Y540 with GF1650 last week. The laptop has a BIOS function to disable iGPU. There is a huge difference in CSGo. I'm getting now around 250-300 fps instead of 100-180.

 

Sounds like it has a MUX chip in it. An easy way to tell is if the Display/Panel options change from appearing in the Intel CPL to the Nvidia CPL.
It's odd though, as usually having a MUX chip would allow you to offer G-Sync support as well.

On Optimus machines it's impossible to have the Intel GPU offline.

 

Hmmmm wonder if I should give this a test as well to see if I get similar results.

On my M18xR2 using 1060 in Optimus mode, hit was like 5-7%.

 

I believe the G-Sync option is reserved for the more premium Y740, although it’s nice to hear the lower end model still allows you to disable Optimus.