High Performance setting for Graphics card - another option?

[787flyer 633]

Hi,

As many of us are aware, one of the settings in the Nvidia Control Panel for FSX and P3D is the Power Management Mode that is typically set to "Prefer Maximum Performance", but today I stumbled across a similar setting that LM recommends for P3D in their basic troubleshooting where you configure the graphics card e.g. "Use the appropriate video card software to configure the graphic card’s control of Prepar3D. For NVIDIA graphics cards, open the NVIDIA Control Panel, select Manage 3D settings, and set the Preferred graphics processor to High-performance NVIDIA processor. You can also set Prepar3D.exe’s preferred graphics processor directly under the Program Settings tab under Manage 3D settings."

 

Now when I went and looked for this particular setting on my system, I could not find it as per LMs advice. Its nowhere to be found in the Nvidia CP.

Instead I found it via the Windows Settings>System>Display>Graphics Settings/Graphics Performance Preference.

From here you can select a specific application e.g. P3D.exe and then the choices are System Default, Power saving and High performance.

I discovered mine was set to "Default".

 

So my question is, are these two options (highlighted in blue above) the same or do they perform different tasks? I assume they are slightly different given one is set to Prefer Max Performance, but the other not set to High. Anyone know the difference and impact this has on the sim?

 

Side Note: I did read up and it appears the reason why the former option mentioned by LM is not available from the Nvidia CP directly is because this setting only shows if you have multiple GPUs installed.

Thoughts/comments on these two settings?

 

Cheers
 

[vp49p3 216]

Hi-from what I've read on these forums, Nvidia inspector shouldn't even be used.  But I certainly could be wrong.

[pgde 571]

5 minutes ago, vp49p3 said:

Hi-from what I've read on these forums, Nvidia inspector shouldn't even be used.  But I certainly could be wrong.

NCP is NOT the same as Nvidia Inspector. Completely different pieces of software and authors. 

[seasley 17]

The setting you found is the one LM is referring to (I think).  It is one that is more effective when used on laptops with dedicated graphics cards.  My Dell XPS has both an Intel GPU built into the processor and a discrete NVIDIA adapter as well. On my laptop the setting allows me to choose the Intel GPU as the Power saving GPU and the NVIDIA as the High performance GPU.  Setting it to Default allows Windows to "pick" the best adapter for the program and circumstance.  For example, if I run a 3D application with the battery fully charged, Windows will use the NVIDIA GPU; if the battery is low, it will run the application using the Intel GPU.

But on both my desktops I see the same dialog box but with the NVIDIA GPU under both options (one desktop is an F processor without a built-in GPU, on the other the built-in GPU is disabled in BIOS).  It is possible that NVIDIA is exposing two instances of the same GPU to the operating system to allow you to select different settings, but I haven't found anything online or in the docs to suggest that they are.  My guess is that Windows always displays the same three options regardless of the number of GPUs in the system, and selecting one versus the other makes no difference when there's only one GPU. It's obvious when I try to run an application on my laptop using the "wrong" GPU; I can't imagine trying to run P3D on a built-in Intel GPU with settings intended for a high-end NVIDIA card. I'm sure LM wants to cover even the obvious things - you've got to start somewhere when diagnosing problems.

pdge is correct that NI and NCP are not the same program, but both accomplish the same thing - alter settings in the NVIDIA GPU driver.  Inspector gives you deeper access to internal variables while Control Panel is much more user friendly.  In my experience and reading, NI was essential in the FSX days and still very important during the early versions of P3D because the simulators weren't designed to take advantage of all the features in newest GPUs.  NI allowed you to turn on these features to enhance the performance and appearance of the sim.  The later versions of P3D are already aware of the latest GPU features and so the effectiveness of manually setting GPU configuration is greatly reduced, and can hurt performance if you're not careful by putting the GPU in one configuration while the simulator is expecting something different.

[787flyer 633]

Thanks for the time spent on the detailed explanation and . That makes a lot of sense to me.

I am using Nvidia CP for P3D but not NI (used this for FSX though) but was curious how both that setting in NV CP and in Windows were associated to one another.