Trouble with mobile GPU and Nvidia Optimus

Hello

I am experiencing problems when playing Final Fantasy XIV on my laptop. I play on an Acer Aspire 5951g with a Nvidia GT 555M graphics card that should be good enough to play FFXIV on low/medium settings but the game won't recognize the graphics card.

In the ingame system settings I can only select the Intel HD 3000 integrated GPU. This should not be a problem because Nvidia Optimus is supposed to enable my dedicated graphics card when I am running games and use it via the Intel HD "card". This feature works fine for every other game (and application) I tested on my laptop except for FFXIV.

I know it is not working with FFXIV because 1. it is not listed when I click on the tray icon to view the Nvidia GPU activity and 2. when I run GPU-Z it only shows the Intel HD card with 100% activity (the Nvidia card remains at 0%)

What I tried so far:

• Uninstall the Nvidia driver and upgrade to the latest.
• Uninstall the Nvidia driver and downgrade to the oldest (downloaded from Acer directly for my laptop).
• Uninstall the Intel HD driver and upgrade to the latest.
• Add FFXIV (and all associated .exe files) to the list of applications that use the dedicated GPU in the Nvidia system settings
• Tried to disable the Intel HD in the BIOS but there is no option to do so
• Disabled the Intel HD in the device manager, this caused a black screen and I had to reboot to fix this

None of those things helped so far. The game runs at 20 fps in the main menu and 10 fps in empty zones.

What I haven't tried is:

• Flashing the bios of my laptop (maybe this will allow me to disable the integrated graphics completely?)
• Reinstall Windows 7

I currently can't reinstall Windows because I don't have any installation discs with me and I am not sure about flashing because it might just as well add nothing to help.

I managed to fix this problem. The culprit was SweetFX. I had the game installed with SweetFX on my desktop and it ran fine. I copied it over to my laptop and it didn't work. After removing SweetFX it is working fine again.

To many software/applications, the Intel HD/nVidia Optimus is to be seen as one GPU (Intel HD); But you can configure so that applications will be instructed to utilise the preferred GPU.

Go to nVidia Control Panel, 3D Settings > Manage 3D settings > Global Settings (tab) and change the "Preferred graphics processor" to "High-performance NVIDIA processor". Or if you prefer finer tuning, then use "Program Settings" and add the program to customise, for FFXIV, you must choose "FFXIV.exe" (alternatively, you can select the program folder by using "Browse").

It seems that there have not been any further posts about this concern being an ongoing issue. Because of this, we are considering it to be resolved. If this does continue to be a concern, please create another thread to further discuss resolutions or contact the Support Center at support.na.square-enix.com for assistance.

- Furlamseere