Dell laptop using internal graphics card instead of external.

[surken]

Hi,
I just bought a new laptop and i cant find how to solve this problem.
its a dell inspiron 3537 and it has a intel hd 4400 as the built in one and a amd radeon hd 8850m as the external.
For example i played the game Arma 3 without problem and it used the external graphics card.
But then i tried to play minecraft but it used the internal graphics card instead and that gave me very bad performance.

I tried to disable the internal graphics card in the device manager but that gives me error code 43 on the external.
Someone told me because they are linked in some way.

Can anyone help me?
(i use windows 8.1 pro)

Thanks in advance

[DaveLembke]

You could try to make the AMD the primary and Intel HD 4400 the secondary. This is usually performed with 2 displays connected in which you specify one to be #1 and the other to be #2. When you look at the graphics properties it might show 2 displays with 1 connected and the other not connected in a 1 and 2 layout. If you can change that to 2 1 instead of 1 2 you might be able to force the AMD to be primary.

Minecraft then going with the 1 primary should then run off of the AMD GPU instead.

Other option which I am not sure if its available or not is to edit the game config for display to use in which there may be a settings and drop down to select the GPU/Video card to use with the game.

I am actually surprised that your getting poor performance on that integrated Intel as for Minecraft is not that complex of a game to run for video cards. My daughter has run it on as old of a computer as a Pentium 4 with a GeForce 6200 AGP video card with 256MB VRAM and it played well with default config. I now have her running on a better system a Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz with a ATI Radeon HD5450 with 1GB VRAM andthe game runs about the same, but loads much faster.