Is there a way for me to confirm that my nVidia card is running an app?

Arxmessor

Model: G3-571-77QK
 
Total hardware rookie here. I have a feeling that my NVidia card is not being used to run my games. My device manager says both the integrated and NVidia adapters are running without errors.

Background:
I have had this laptop connected to a monitor from day 1. I noticed that my games were running much worse than they should have been considering the laptop specs. Specifically, I was getting ~30 fps on a game called "Escape From Tarkov". I eventually manually disabled the integrated graphics from the Windows device manager. Boom. Fixed. 60+fps and the monitor resolution auto-adjusted to something way better.

Fast forward some months. I am not running my laptop connected to a monitor anymore. I changed no hardware settings or in-game settings. I tried to run a game but I was getting 1 fps! Yep, one frame per second. Zerp.

 I re-enabled my integrated graphics. I am now getting the ~30 fps I was getting before I disabled the integrated graphics. This makes me think that the NVidia card is not actually being utilized.

But I am confused because I checked the task manager while running the game. It shows that the NVidia card is at 20% usage when running that game and only 3% from integrated card.

Is there any way other than task manager to see what my cards are being used on? Any idea what might be going on?

RanY2J

Arxmessor said:

Model: G3-571-77QK
 
Total hardware rookie here. I have a feeling that my NVidia card is not being used to run my games. My device manager says both the integrated and NVidia adapters are running without errors.

Background:
I have had this laptop connected to a monitor from day 1. I noticed that my games were running much worse than they should have been considering the laptop specs. Specifically, I was getting ~30 fps on a game called "Escape From Tarkov". I eventually manually disabled the integrated graphics from the Windows device manager. Boom. Fixed. 60+fps and the monitor resolution auto-adjusted to something way better.

Fast forward some months. I am not running my laptop connected to a monitor anymore. I changed no hardware settings or in-game settings. I tried to run a game but I was getting 1 fps! Yep, one frame per second. Zerp.

 I re-enabled my integrated graphics. I am now getting the ~30 fps I was getting before I disabled the integrated graphics. This makes me think that the NVidia card is not actually being utilized.

But I am confused because I checked the task manager while running the game. It shows that the NVidia card is at 20% usage when running that game and only 3% from integrated card.

Is there any way other than task manager to see what my cards are being used on? Any idea what might be going on?

Your Nvidia control panel can send you a notification.

1. Double-click NVIDIA Control Panel.

2. Click View and next Display GPU Activity Icon in Notification Area.

3. Click the new icon in the notification area. A pop-up will show applications using the NVIDIA graphics. When the NVIDIA graphics is not used, it will show None.

Spelunker

 Try the following:
1) Go to the Geforce control panel 
2) 3D settings 
3) Manually route everything to use the Nvidia, instead of using the Generic Setting.

Then restart the system and try playing your PC games.