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The Optimus technology by NVIDIA is said to automatically control performance of graphics card, like increasing performance when the laptop is on AC power, and reduce performance on battery battery. My question is, how can I turn off this useless technology? I purchased the graphics card so I could enjoy games with higher FPS.

By the way, my GPU has been over clocked and playing graphically-intensive games such as Battlefield 4 has a relatively high FPS, when on AC power. You might think I could've just removed the battery, charge the laptop itself and play the game but no, my laptop comes with a non-removable battery pack. Kind of sucks.

Anyways, just to let you know, on AC power, BF4's performance would be at 40-60+ FPS, and on battery power, the performance would be at 20-35+ FPS.

I think I didn't make myself clear, so here's an edit:

I want to turn off this technology so my graphics card performance won't get reduced on battery power.

Extra info:

Laptop model: ASUS S551LN VivoBook

Windows 8.1 64 bit

4GB RAM

500GB storage

Intel® Core™ i5-4200U @1.60GHz 2.30GHz

MegaRodeon
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3 Answers3

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In short, you cannot disable Optimus.

See this SuperUser post/answer: Brian's answer

There are some newer laptops in which I've observed a BIOS option that allows one to disable the Optimus feature. But knowing how this system works, I'm not sure that will yield the result that you wanted and might just force the OS to use the IGP for everything.

Although, the context of your question suggests its not really Optimus you are having issues with, but rather nVidia's automatic performance scaling when on battery power...

From nVidia's customer support page: Setting "Power management mode" from Adaptive to Maximum Performance

Also go into Windows' own power settings and create or alter the High Performance profile to have Maximum performance on everything, especially CPU.

If all of that doesn't change anything, delve into the BIOS again and find the power states for the CPU and disable anything related to power savings.

If all of this doesn't work, that means at some fundamental level, whether drivers or hardware implementation, someone decided that if you unplug the machine, you will have a ceiling on your performance. Hope this helps.

Community
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James Lui
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It is possible that you have more CPU cores parked whilst running on battery. There's a registry hack here if you're interested. Not tested this one personally, so be careful.

doggyTourettes
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It's worth checking the registry for the correct values, if you're up for it.

It's quite a long thread, but the basic values you're after are at the bottom of this page. Fire up RegEdit and run a search for 'PerfLevelSrc' without the quotes, (make sure you select 'Computer' at the top of the left hand pane before you start). When you get a result, scroll back up the right hand pane and check 'Device Description' to make sure you're dealing with the NVidia GPU and not the Intel graphics. If it's the Intel just hit 'F3' and it'll look for the next match in the registry.

When you're happy you've got the NVidia, set PerfLevelSrc to 2222, and the four PowerMizer values to 0. When you're done hit 'F3' again and repeat the whole process for any other hits. Don't forget to check you're dealing with NVidia.

When you've finished going through the registry, reboot your computer and check the results. Good luck.

doggyTourettes
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