Tag Archives: Dedicated Graphics Card

How to Make Windows Use Dedicated Graphics Card

Problem:

You have a laptop with 2 graphic cards: one is built-in graphics card (e.g. Intel(R) UHD Graphics), and the other is a dedicated graphics card (e.g. NVIDIA Quadro P520).

However it seems that Windows does NOT use the dedicated graphics card.

Verification:

You can verify this issue by

  1. Opening a video file, then
  2. Opening Task Manager,
  3. Going to Performance tab, and
  4. Checking the percent usage of GPU 0 (i.e. Intel(R) UHD Graphics) and GPU 1 (i.e. NVIDIA Quadro P520).
Solution:
  1. Open Device Manager and uninstall the dedicated graphics card driver.
  2. Go to https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us.
  3. Set Product Series to Quadro Series (Notebooks).
  4. Set Product to Quadro P520.
  5. Set Operating System to Windows 10 64-bit.
  6. Click the SEARCH button.
  7. Download and install the latest driver.
  8. That’s all. Please do let Windows automatically select a graphic processor for a task to avoid potential performance issues.
    Typically Windows only uses a dedicated graphics card for heavy graphics tasks.