Hi guys,
i play Battlestar Galactica Online in the Unity Web Player.
Problem: My Notebook doesn’t notice that it has to switch to my Nvidia dedicated card - the graphical calculation is only done by my integrated Intel GMA HD card.
Even if I start a programm in background that forces the notebook to switch to the dedicated card, the game doesn’t run a bit better. The Unity Web Player is not able to be performed by my nVidia Card.
How can I solve this? Dont wont to buy a different laptop only because this web player is unable to switch correcttly to the needed graphics-card!
Greetz 
I have the exact same issue, but in my case it is with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online. So frustrating to be stuck with my integrated card when this expensive dedicated card is in there but sitting idle.
In my case it is a Dell XPS L701X, with an nVidia 435M graphics card.
I posted this issue on the NotebookReview forums. Someone from nVidia said they would get back to me ASAP about it, but two months have passed and nothing. Not sure if Unity can do anything, or get nVidia on the case. My suggestion, and what I am doing, is to post in as many places as you can about this, including nVidia forums, your notebook manufacturer forums, and anywhere else you can in order to try and get attention to the issue.
Is there any way to disable the onboard graphics (in the BIOS) so it would have to use the NVidia card?
I’ve not checked on a notebook but it is a regular feature in a desktop motherboard BIOS that has onboard video.
Unfortunately no. To this point Optimus means you have very little control over the video card. You can apparently right click on an executable and tell it to run with the discrete video but that doesn’t necessarily actually make the application use the discrete video card. Sigh.
Press dell when stating up your pc or whatver you got mapped for that. Change it there
Jimmy-B, you do of course realize this makes no sense.
did you try and change your graphics card in bios? since you cannot “right click” there…
Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my reply to Don Gray, there isn’t an option to disable / switch graphics cards in the bios. Thanks for the suggestion though…that was my first try a long while ago. I guess it is up to Dell to make this happen, but you’d think nVidia would have make the fix so that Unity Player would activate the dedicated card.
don’t see why its up to dell. for soon 2 years NVIDIA has provided drivers for mobile directly on their page too and you might want to see what the newest version there is cause notebooks lose driver up to dateness after 6 months at best (dell keeps them alive longer, but others like asus drop them out of highly active after 3-4 months already) so its not like you will be able to avoid using nvidia drivers anyway
also you can always revert to the dell ones if the nvidia ones don’t work.
It’s up to Dell to change the bios is what I was saying–nVidia and drivers can’t do anything about that. But Dell shouldn’t have to really change the BIOS to allow for that, I think nVidia needs make Optimus work with Unity.
By the way, Optimus systems (through the nVidia control panel) check daily for which programs will use the dedicated GPU, so it not a driver an issue.
But if someone has a viable solution right now that works with an Optimus based notebook, I’d love to hear it! Please…Otherwise, I guess the number of people with this issue will simply continue to grow.
Most people buying from dell don’t really tend to put other hardware in it. They will more likely simply send it back. U can buy another MoBo i guess.
Well I got a Dell XPS Laptop too but, I don’t really have problems running games made with unity using the nVidia Card. I got a problem running Unity3d itself. I have to force Unity3d to run using the Intel HD Graphics, otherwise unity’s interface gets all buggy and slow.
I also play BGO and finally go tired of how bad it runs, my desktop from 2003 running integrated plays better than the integrated on this shitty thing, how badly I wish there was just a permanent way to turn off the integrated I hate it -_-
Apparently the issue is that it goes through as an active X plug in not an actual firefox plug in.
However I’m not an expert, but if anyone knows if there is a specific install file or fileset that unity puts in then there might be a way to change its affinity, I know there’s also a command for the command line to force gpu affinity, I don’t know if that would really affect anything by forcing affinity because I have it set in the NV panel to go to dedicated but I can tell it’s not working, there might also be a work around/hack to perma shut off integrated, I’m looking into it right now I’ll let you guys know if I find anything (as well as like 6 other forums because NO ONE at nvidia seems to give a frack that we want to just shut off the integrated altogether)
but if any of you guys know where unity installs too i can try to set affinity on those files or something like that depending on there type, if not like i said I’ll figure something out -_-
Same problem here… new notebook with NV Optimus.(PB EastNote TK with GT540M 1 GB). Nvidia Optimus don’t switches to Nvidia CPU when Unity webplayer starts. (tested on W7 Firefox6, Crome10, IE9)
Anyone has found some solution?
Max
I have this issue with a dell xps on my standalone applications. I updated my NVIDIA driver to 280.26 and set up nvidia control panel so that it forces the unity application to run on the nvidia card but it still looks like crap: very low res textures etc.
Anyone have any idea how to sort this out for stand alone unity applications? If not, this dell laptop is going back for a refund.
very low texture res has nothing to do with the gpu, unity does not toggle that down.
thats a consequence of you using low quality settings which uses 1/2 or 1/4 or 1/8 th texture resolutions and alike 
no have my quality set to fantastic and it looks like textures are 4x4 pixels or something equally small
Could be Dreamora is talking about he the texture size settings in the Unity editor.
