Acer Aspire v3 772g crashes when I switch to Nvidia card

I recently installed Skyrim on my laptop and in the options it shows only the intel graphics card and suggests a low graphics setting. When I change to 'always use Nvidia' in the Nvidia control panel, the Nvidia card appears, ultra high settings are recommended and as soon as I start the game it crashes.

From then on, until I switch the settings back to auto my laptop crashes right after startup whenever I do something, like open a browser. I'm using an external monitorwith 1920x1200 setting, not the laptop monitor, but the Nvidia card should be able to handle that, right?

I also wonder about the auto-select feature, if the laptop crashes when I set to Nvidia only, did it ever select that card before? But that's a mere side question.

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IronFly

Can i suggest you to try to update Nvidia drivers if you not already did?

http://global-download.acer.com/GDFiles/Driver/VGA/VGA_NVIDIA_9.18.13.3235_W81x64W8x64_A.zip?acerid=635339138586659773&Step1=NOTEBOOK&Step2=ASPIRE&Step3=ASPIRE%20V3-772G&OS=81P1&LC=en&BC=ACER&SC=PA_6

MonikaFx

I checked the drivers already and the ones recommended on the Acer page are the ones I have installed. VGA_NVIDIA_9.18.13.3235_W81x64W8x64_A(1).zip That's what I have installed, sorry I should have mentioned that right away. I did an upgrade to Windows 8.1 a while ago and that required uninstalling and re-installing the graphics drivers for both cards so they are the ones recommended by Acer and not the latest for the cards.

MonikaFx

Just an update, maybe it will help someone with similar problems or someone has an idea. It's a rather long post, a summary of what I tried and the results I had. Unless you're an interested geek or have a similar problem just skip it.

I spent a lot of time on the Nvidia forum and did a lot of searching etc. to find that some other people have a similar problem to mine (crashes, weird pixels - I didn't write that before, didn't know how to describe it). Unfortunately in none of those posts was ever a solution.

Answers suggested were: temperature being too high, wrong or buggy driver, hardware issue etc. but nothing definitive.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver a few times. One good suggestion was to use the monitoring capabilities of MSI Afterburner and I did that.

I set my cards to autoselect again and ran the monitoring while opening different programs/games. One thing I found was that the Nvidia card actually was used and that the temperature stayed low. Also when I tried Skyrim again (btw. now it showed the Nvidia card in the options), Low quality setting (LOW!), and in windowed mode. It crashed again (showing weird pixels etc.) in the beginning when I just let that start screen run for a while. The Monitoring showed 99% GPU usage at time of crash. I did a bit more searching and found a suggestion that it may have to do with Vsynch.

Next I turned of Vsynch in the global Nvidia settings. Skyrim crashed again, didn't show weird pixels though and the crash happened when I chose 'New Game' and it just loaded the new game (sound continued, screen was black). GPU usage was at 100% again. I let it run for a while, got another spike and the message of 'driver has crashed and recovered'. No complete crash of the whole computer this time, looks like turning of vsynch may have helped.

Took a picture (gyazo link)of the monitoring information (GPU 1 is Nvidia, GPU2 is intel) in case anyone is interested.

You can see the spikes at GPU usage, drops at GPU utilization limit and the framerate drops (highest was 60, my monitor can't do more). Also temperature stayed in the 50s (°C). Heading is above the graph.

So it's not the temperature. Hardware issue is still possible but the card does get used and works for some time.

After so many re-installations of the driver I doubt the issue is there though that's what I would normally suspect (maybe I should reinstall it just one more time?).

It may be some configuration of my system though I had some problems right after I bought the laptop, was just too lazy then to do anything about it. Nvidia Control panel, the top option 'Adjust image with preview' never worked, always crashed the computer when I tried it, still does.