Two display adapter? Can I switch?

[Shahid_7]

Hi,

Apparently my notebook pc has two display adapters. one is Intel HD graphics 5500 and other is Nvidia Geforce 820M.  the active one is Intel HD graphics 5500 because in Directx Digonistic tool the display adpter is shown the intel one. my questions is what are these two buddies doing together. can I switch between them? I am attacting some screenshots. 

Can anyone help?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Shahid_7

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

What you have is something known as Switchable Graphics -- but the switching is done AUTOMATICALLY by Windows, when the OS detects the need for more graphics power than the Intel chipset can provide.

Unless there is someting in the BIOS for disabling the Intel video chip (and there usually is NOT), there is no way to select the Nvidia chip by default.

[lppedd]

You laptop is provided of a technology called Nvidia Optimus. It automatically manages GPU resources based on power consumption, load and user settings.

Unfortunately you can't swith manually between dGPU (Nvidia) and iGPU (Intel) from the OS. You could check if you've got a dedicated option in the BIOS, but I doubt.

If you need to run a specific application with a specific GPU card you can use the Nvidia Control Panel to instruct Optimus. But this works application per application, not globally.