Technical: Allow selection of video card

[Narc]

I have a triple monitor setup at home, using two GPUs -- an on-board one and a dedicated GeForce 9800 GTX+. For technical reasons, the on-board one has to be the first video card Windows sees, which means Factorio actually selects it as the active device when it runs. This has the unfortunate implication that, if I try to run with the window on one of the other two displays, my framerate is rather forcefully capped at 30 FPS... which happens to be just half of what Factorio is supposed to render at. Even worse (for me) is that, as far as Windows is concerned, the primary display is on one of the other two displays.

The interesting thing is, the game is perfectly playable at half-speed, so I didn't actually notice this until I took Factorio to work with me... where there is only the one (also on-board) video card... which ran the game at full framerate. Now, I can get the game up to full speed by moving its window to the right display, but I've mostly been dedicating that one to web browsing and longer reading, so it's not in the most convenient position for anything active like actually playing a game. It would be very helpful for me to be able to select which of my display drivers is bound by the game, and I'm hoping it also won't take much of your dev time to do this, either.

Can I has? Pretty please?

[rymn]

This is something you can do with nvidia control panel.

If nvidia control pattern isn't comparable with your onboard vc, try this. (Assuming your on board is Intel in your proc).
ucdavistechtalk.wordpress.com/2012/05/2 ... h-optimus/

[Narc]

Um, what? I'm fortunate enough that both video cards are nVidia (I have a thing for the nForce chipsets... well, had a thing for them), but I still don't see how that fixes the video card ordering -- changing the display order is not it.

"This is something you can do" doesn't actually tell me where to look -- if you know there's something I can do (and believe me, I went through the whole nVidia Control Panel just now, and I can't find it), please tell me where it is.

[rymn]

Um, what? I'm fortunate enough that both video cards are nVidia (I have a thing for the nForce chipsets... well, had a thing for them), but I still don't see how that fixes the video card ordering -- changing the display order is not it.

"This is something you can do" doesn't actually tell me where to look -- if you know there's something I can do (and believe me, I went through the whole nVidia Control Panel just now, and I can't find it), please tell me where it is.

Sorry, it has been s long time since I've used the control panel but I remember it be pretty straight forward.

I don't remember the exact terminology they use, I try to explain. In the nvidia control panel there's a tab that will let you set specific rules for an application like force AA, force resolutions, ext. There use to be an option to choose which card it should use.

Alternately, I believe the first tab in the control panel is to set up your graphics card preferences, like which should be the primary card and rather the other card should function as a secondary or physx or not at all.

I hope this helped. Keep in mind is hard to know your specific situation.

[Narc]

You might be remembering something from an older nVidia control panel -- I thought that kind of control existed, too, but it doesn't. Setting the primary display does nothing to the video card order (which is fetched by OpenGL or DirectX in whatever order the hardware abstraction layer hands them over; indeed, dxdiag agrees the nForce on-board card is "display 1"). I looked in the per-program settings, as well, but ultimately this isn't really something the graphics driver really *has* all that much control over -- it's the hardware abstraction layer that fetches things.

The right place for this setting is in the application that's running -- either as automatic detection (what's the graphics device of the display I'm being presented on?) or as a user-configurable setting (here's all your graphics devices, which one am I supposed to use?).

Thank you for trying, though.

[rymn]

Yeah, this is old information. This just doesn't seem like a feature they would remove especially when the computer gaming community has drastically moved to multi monitor and multi gpu machines.

Check one more time for me. I've found an old discussion on overclock.net with breadcrumbs for this feature:

Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings > Select a program to customize.

[Narc]

Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings > Select a program to customize.

That is where the program-specific settings live, yes. There's nothing in there about "use this GPU", although I could set it to single-display performance mode if I wanted to break my setup even further.

[rymn]

I'm sorry, I'm all out of suggestions Let's hope the devs can add this feature to the game, but you would expect it to be a long way out as the actual game is still in early development.

[Narc]

I'm not wanting to start a series of bumps for attention, but this issue has been leaving me unwilling to actually play Factorio at home at all, and at work I'm usually busy with actual work. I'd really expect this to be as simple as adding a dropdown in the video settings panel listing all the video cards, and requiring a restart of the game to apply.

[kovarex]

I'm sorry for your trouble.
I can take a look at it, but our todo list is quite huge these days.
I'm not even sure if it is possible to do with our library.

[Narc]

Oh, all righty. If it is possible, it'll probably also be pretty easy, for what it's worth.

Either way, don't worry too much about it. I contributed and am happy I did so; if it happens that I can't really play the game at its normal speed, eh, I'll live.