If your game or game engine is giving you terrible performance and you are running on a Laptop using NVIDIA graphics, there is a very good chance Windows and Optimus are choosing the wrong GPU. If you want to get maximum performance out of your machine, you want it to selected the dedicated GPU. If you want more then a few minutes of battery life while unplugged, you want it to select the integrated GPU. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't always get it right... AND Microsoft changed the way you specify which GPU to use. So this tip/tutorial will show you how to choose the graphics card for your game or game engine to run on.

Let windows decide should never be an option ever

I DID EVERYTHING you did and still it it using the integrated gpu

what to do when my GPU 0 (intel) is working, but my GPU 1 (rtx 3050) is always on 0%? please help !

"Microsoft screwed this up big time", yeah, they screwed EVERYTHING up big time. Unfortunetly too much of my software is windows based.

New UI may be less intuitive, less productive, take longer to use and hide information from you, but it's "clean" and "modern" and "minimalistic" so you're going to like it, damn it.

xbox pc games cant use this, so if you're like me and cant get destiny 2 to use the right gpu, you're out of luck :)

Actually this was very useful, I didn't know my Unity was running on my integrated video card :O This makes developing so much faster!

Worth noting that depending on power settings on laptops, windows can still ignore the preferred GPU and run on integrated. Also worth noting that certain laptops (such as my XPS 15) have the display output wired into the integrated GPU rather than the dedicated one, meaning that putting high load on the dedicated GPU will actually also affect the integrated one, since lots of data is copied constantly. End result is that performance is still throttled by the internal GPU even though the dedicated one is being used for the heavy lifting.

"That's because Microsoft is kindof stupid." That's the answer to so many questions. I'm sure this has something to do with all the stuff around the power regulations stuff that came out of California and a couple states that follow California. I forget the details, but it's the same stuff that had rumors going around that gaming computers were being banned in some states. Either way, it's one thing to set defaults to something light, and something else all-together to add arbitrary hoops for users. Arbitrary hoops, like TPM "requirements" for Windows 11 that can be bypassed with a registry entry.

I'm having the opposite problem where certain Windows processes are running on the dedicated GPU rather than the integrated (searchapp.exe, textinputhost.exe). Unfortunately this video didn't help me solve the issue. It just made me hate Windows that much more. Really miss the older Window's OS versions. They weren't perfect, but they were a thousand times easier to work with than the trash they shovel out now.

"What Microsoft did was make it worse."

I think the context menu thing was originally by Nvidia, then got removed when Windows took over that functionality. And something you probably didn't know, but AMD has a very equivalent thing called Power Xpress or so (at least I think it's the equivalent).

Yep. I hit this issue once many moons ago and had to dig for answers. Nice to see a smart video about it to guide future generations, especially since Microsoft made it more complicated.

thanks GFS , trying to figure out for ages on why my discrete gpu is 0 percent in the task manager and found your video. new subscriber here

awesome tip for laptop users! The market back in the early VR days this was a killer is killer when trying to run the R on early VR capable laptops.

just an FYI you do not have to find the path of the application, windows settings will automatically insert it from shortcut. when you click browse, just add the app from the shortcut located on your desktop (or wherever your shortcut is), the path will automatically be inserted. I just want to include that I also think this is ridiculous that Windows has made the unilateral decision to control all graphics settings.

Just a a quick tip: instead of Windows+X and then selecting "Settings", just use Windows+I (that's a capital i) to open Settings directly

THanks! all this time I thought that AE and other programs were using my GPU, now its 100% better!

Superb video on selecting GPU explicitly in current Windows 👍