gtx 660M card not being used on Lenovo y580 in some circumstances

ival

Estimable
Dec 27, 2015
4
0
4,510
Hello,

I have a Lenovo y580 which comes with gtx 660M dedicated card. Everything on the laptop is stock/ome. For many applications the dedicated card gets activated as it should, however, I noticed that for some it does not and it doesn't seem that I can force to used the dedicated card using the "run with graphics processor" option. I have the nVidia graphics processor as the default graphics processor selected in the nvidia graphics manager. I have the recent 358.91 drivers installed.

I noticed some inconsistency only recently (after having the laptop for 3 years!) when trying to run a game on the Steam platform. Valve's Steam software uses the dedicated graphics card, however Valve's own Dota 2 game uses the grahpics card only if the 32 bit version of the software is used, but does not use the dedicated grahpics card if the 64 bit version of the software is used (dota 2 comes with both a 32 and 64 bit executables). Similar issue occurs when I attempt to run a package called COMSOL Multiphysics 4.3, the 32 bit version uses the dedicated graphics card but the 64 bit version of the software does not (but since the solvers don't complain I never noticed). However, Autocad 2016 (which is a 64 bit application) is able to use the dedicated graphics card. When I launch MATLAB (64 bit application), even when trying to force the nvidia graphics card, it still only uses the onboard Intel graphics. However, if I use gpu-based computational functions (such as gpuArray), it will start using the nvidia graphics card (!). Again, I never noticed it before since all the gpu-based functions work as intended. As it stands, I am not sure if the problem is new or old but it is definitely annoying.


Does anyone know what's going on? How can I resolve this?

Thank you for your help!
 

ival

Estimable
Dec 27, 2015
4
0
4,510
Hi,

Thank you for the suggestion. I just did the clean install and followed all of the steps, unfortunately this did not change how my system behaves.