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.