My company has provided me with a rather nice laptop for my latest job, and I discovered that it has an NVIDIA Quadro K1000M inside. Although I won't exactly need it much, I do want to take advantage of it anyway. So I have a couple of questions that I couldn't find answers to by searching google.

1. How do you activate it as your primary display adapter over the default GPU (Intel HD 4000)? This is a Lenovo ThinkPad running Win8.1 x64, and it doesn't appear to show up anywhere except in device manager. I even tried enumerating it through Direct3D, and it still didn't show up.

2. I went under NV's driver webpage, and could not find a driver for this model. The closest I could find was the K1200M series, but that's not the exact GPU that I have. Will this driver work? I'm asking because I'd like to have the OpenGL 4.5 support, and I don't believe Microsoft's default driver (dated 2013) has it.

Thanks,

Shogun.

1. In the NVIDIA System Control panel which can be found

2. here.

/closed

I have the same card in my laptop (likely the same, model W530)

In general, if its enabled then the card will perk up when needed for intensive work. Just make sure its enabled and it *should* do the right thing-- you want the Intel GPU to take over when doing mundane tasks like editing code or web-browsing, you don't want to force the Quadro on all the time. The Quadro can drain a full battery in under two hours at load (and that's with the larger battery), not to mention the heat which is an issue even if plugged into the wall. If you want to force the Quadro to take over for certain applications, you can do that through the NV control panel.

If it doesn't let you enumerate it, its probably disabled or the driver isn't installed/active.

I'd find it annoying to always go into the NVidia control panel or configure it for each new program.

Just put this into a program which needs OpenGL4.5:

#ifdef _WIN32
#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
#include <windows.h>

// activate better GPU
extern "C" {
__declspec(dllexport) DWORD NvOptimusEnablement = 1;
__declspec(dllexport) int AmdPowerXpressRequestHighPerformance = 1;
}
#endif

topic is answered shogun didin't see combobox where you can choose quadro for desktop / notebooks

topic is answered shogun didin't see combobox where you can choose quadro for desktop / notebooks

Not at all.

Several Lenovo laptops these cards (I've got one of them among my computers at work as my main box), and the drivers are not on the NVidia site.

Many mobile graphics cards are modified in ways that break the standard drivers. This is one of those cases.

How do you activate it as your primary display adapter over the default GPU

It was tricky for me on my Lenovo laptop. Like you I wanted several of the better features, and my killer feature was using two external displays plus the laptop screen.

First, I needed to go into bios and make sure the settings were correct. For me, that was selecting the right bios options also ensuring the "Optimus" option was turned on, that is their corporate name for the various advanced features.

Also touched on above, unfortunately you need to get the (somewhat outdated) drivers from Lenovo if you want to use all the functionality. I started by downloading all of them since the last official one for the machine, then installed, tested it out, reboot a few times and verify everything works, made a driver checkpoint, then went to the next one repeating the process until one breaks for what I need. I was able to go up to the April 2014 version for mine before it became incompatible, hopefully you'll have something that is relatively current.

I have the same card in my laptop (likely the same, model W530)

In general, if its enabled then the card will perk up when needed for intensive work. Just make sure its enabled and it *should* do the right thing-- you want the Intel GPU to take over when doing mundane tasks like editing code or web-browsing, you don't want to force the Quadro on all the time. The Quadro can drain a full battery in under two hours at load (and that's with the larger battery), not to mention the heat which is an issue even if plugged into the wall. If you want to force the Quadro to take over for certain applications, you can do that through the NV control panel.

If it doesn't let you enumerate it, its probably disabled or the driver isn't installed/active.

I ended up enabling the quadro through the control pannel. This makes sense; the batterly life isn't so great when it's on, and I had a feeling it would happen.

I'd find it annoying to always go into the NVidia control panel or configure it for each new program.

Just put this into a program which needs OpenGL4.5:

#ifdef _WIN32
#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
#include <windows.h>

// activate better GPU
extern "C" {
__declspec(dllexport) DWORD NvOptimusEnablement = 1;
__declspec(dllexport) int AmdPowerXpressRequestHighPerformance = 1;
}
#endif

Now that's interesting. I had to google this because I didn't know this functionality existed. I'm adding that to my engine later :)

topic is answered shogun didin't see combobox where you can choose quadro for desktop / notebooks

Not at all.

Several Lenovo laptops these cards (I've got one of them among my computers at work as my main box), and the drivers are not on the NVidia site.

Many mobile graphics cards are modified in ways that break the standard drivers. This is one of those cases.

How do you activate it as your primary display adapter over the default GPU

It was tricky for me on my Lenovo laptop. Like you I wanted several of the better features, and my killer feature was using two external displays plus the laptop screen.

First, I needed to go into bios and make sure the settings were correct. For me, that was selecting the right bios options also ensuring the "Optimus" option was turned on, that is their corporate name for the various advanced features.

Also touched on above, unfortunately you need to get the (somewhat outdated) drivers from Lenovo if you want to use all the functionality. I started by downloading all of them since the last official one for the machine, then installed, tested it out, reboot a few times and verify everything works, made a driver checkpoint, then went to the next one repeating the process until one breaks for what I need. I was able to go up to the April 2014 version for mine before it became incompatible, hopefully you'll have something that is relatively current.

Yeah, I may end up having to use Lenovo's outdated drivers to get the best functionality. I did get the official NV driver working, but I have a feeling that there's a bit more to it. Probably some power settings custom to this notebook PC hardware. I noticed this is often the case with many laptops.

Shogun.