Tech Tip: Optimus

One of the fancy “new” features on my Latitude E6420 that I got a month or so ago was an nVidia technology called Optimus, which can help save battery life by reverting to onboard Intel graphics if applications don’t need the high graphics bandwidth the dedicated GPU can provide. I say “new” because this is the same technology Apple baked into their laptops at least a year ago. In theory, it’s a nice technology, but after a couple weeks’ use I found myself turning it off in the BIOS because the card never seemed to turn itself on when I needed it (like when playing StarCraft II).

Earlier this week I came across an issue at work with a customer who had a laptop with Optimus (it’s enabled by default) that was causing PowerPoint to crash upon launching. Windows 7 blamed the nVidia drivers for the crash, but what I suspect is that the Optimus technology freaked out because it couldn’t tell whether it should be using the dedicated GPU for PowerPoint or the onboard graphics. I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case or not, but it did seem to fix the problem.