Graphics card not living up to its potential, any ideas?

MrDoctorMatt

Honorable
Jun 28, 2013
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10,510
Okay, so I have an ASUS N76VZ with the following specs:

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 4GB DDR3 (According to GPU-Z)
Integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000
CPU: Intel i7-3630QM 2.4GHz
RAM: 8GB
OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit

At the moment I'm trying to run Dragon Age Inquisition and I've seen videos and read about people running the game with basically the same specs as me or worse at medium-high with a comfortable, stable 30-45 fps. When I play the game, I have to play at the very lowest settings if I play at my native resolution (1920x1080), and I've tried the user.cfg file tweak. I still only manage to get a maximum of about 35 fps in very rare cases, with the average fps in the Hinterlands being 25-28, dipping down to 15-20 occassionally.
I feel as though something is dragging my fps down that shouldn't be. While DAI is open, GPU-Z shows that the 650M is taking the load at 99% most of the time, but the Integrated card still does work and its temperature goes up to around the 70-80 degree mark which I find odd.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why I am getting such bad performance? I realise my laptop isn't the best but it should still be able to run Inquisition much better than it is doing at the moment.
 
Hi,

Maybe a quick installation of a newer graphics card driver might help.
- Go to Device Manager and uninstall the NVIDIA graphics driver.
- Open Programs and Features then uninstall anything related to NVIDIA graphics.
- Download and install the latest driver from it's support site.
- Here'e the link: nvidia.com/download/index.aspx
- Reboot after the installation
- After it restarted make sure to set your games to run using NVIDIA processor. You can set it from NVIDIA Control Panel.