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Long story short, I've already read the Steam and GOG forums and hard setting your dedicated GPU on a laptop to the game. I have TWO newer laptop, one has a year old Radeon GPU and the other has a GTX 960m. I have hard set Sacred.exe to use the dedicated (AMD and NVIDIA) GPUs but no matter what, it uses the Intel HD crap.

I've tried two laptops, Windows 7 AND Windows 8.1. No matter what I do, it only uses Intel. I've loaded it on an old desktop with Windows 7 and an old NVIDIA 7000 series GPU and it runs just fine.

Help!
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digitalforce: Long story short, I've already read the Steam and GOG forums and hard setting your dedicated GPU on a laptop to the game. I have TWO newer laptop, one has a year old Radeon GPU and the other has a GTX 960m. I have hard set Sacred.exe to use the dedicated (AMD and NVIDIA) GPUs but no matter what, it uses the Intel HD crap.

I've tried two laptops, Windows 7 AND Windows 8.1. No matter what I do, it only uses Intel. I've loaded it on an old desktop with Windows 7 and an old NVIDIA 7000 series GPU and it runs just fine.

Help!
Give me a few minutes to dig out my laptop and I'll see what I can find out. It also has a GTX 960M chip.

Flynn
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digitalforce: Long story short, I've already read the Steam and GOG forums and hard setting your dedicated GPU on a laptop to the game. I have TWO newer laptop, one has a year old Radeon GPU and the other has a GTX 960m. I have hard set Sacred.exe to use the dedicated (AMD and NVIDIA) GPUs but no matter what, it uses the Intel HD crap.

I've tried two laptops, Windows 7 AND Windows 8.1. No matter what I do, it only uses Intel. I've loaded it on an old desktop with Windows 7 and an old NVIDIA 7000 series GPU and it runs just fine.

Help!
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FlynnArrowstarr: Give me a few minutes to dig out my laptop and I'll see what I can find out. It also has a GTX 960M chip.

Flynn
Thank you good sir! PS -- I know my way around both NVIDIA and AMD Control Panels. I've also set dedicate GPUs on several other games with zero issues.
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FlynnArrowstarr: Give me a few minutes to dig out my laptop and I'll see what I can find out. It also has a GTX 960M chip.

Flynn
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digitalforce: Thank you good sir! PS -- I know my way around both NVIDIA and AMD Control Panels. I've also set dedicate GPUs on several other games with zero issues.
Yeah, it's doing the same thing for me. The laptop I have indicates what GPU is being used by the color of the power LED - blue for Intel and red for nVidia. It starts out red, but switches to blue about halfway through the Ascaron logo. I have a few games that do this - The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is another with the added twist that it needs to be run in Windowed mode to not include horrid screen flickering.

Oddly, after running it for the first time, subsequent launches the game stalls during loading. Not certain if that's due to Windows 10, but I suspect it's so. I may need to play with Compatibility settings. I did poke around in Sacred's settings.cfg file. I'll see if altering anything in there helps. =)

Edit: Setting Sacred.exe to Windows XP SP3 in the Compatibility tab fixed the crashing issue for me. Nothing in the Settings.cfg file seems to affect the game's graphics card choice. More testing...

Edit 2: Well, even setting the entire system to use the nVidia 960M by default results in the graphics switching to Intel midway through the Ascaron logo. I think we may be stuck with the Intel for this game, heh.

Which Intel HD do you have paired with the 960M? I have the HD 5600 (Core i7 5700HQ CPU). It actually works pretty well for an integrated. Surprisingly. Sacred Gold is playable with the chip with decent framerate (some tearing occasionally) and no flashing or odd graphical glitches so far.

Flynn
Post edited October 21, 2015 by FlynnArrowstarr
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digitalforce: Thank you good sir! PS -- I know my way around both NVIDIA and AMD Control Panels. I've also set dedicate GPUs on several other games with zero issues.
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FlynnArrowstarr: Yeah, it's doing the same thing for me. The laptop I have indicates what GPU is being used by the color of the power LED - blue for Intel and red for nVidia. It starts out red, but switches to blue about halfway through the Ascaron logo. I have a few games that do this - The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is another with the added twist that it needs to be run in Windowed mode to not include horrid screen flickering.

Oddly, after running it for the first time, subsequent launches the game stalls during loading. Not certain if that's due to Windows 10, but I suspect it's so. I may need to play with Compatibility settings. I did poke around in Sacred's settings.cfg file. I'll see if altering anything in there helps. =)

Edit: Setting Sacred.exe to Windows XP SP3 in the Compatibility tab fixed the crashing issue for me. Nothing in the Settings.cfg file seems to affect the game's graphics card choice. More testing...

Edit 2: Well, even setting the entire system to default to the nVidia 960M by default results in the graphics switching to Intel midway through the Ascaron logo. I think we may be stuck with the Intel for this game, heh.

Which Intel HD do you have paired with the 960M? I have the HD 5600 (Core i7 5700HQ CPU). It actually works pretty well for an integrated. Surprisingly. Sacred Gold is playable with the chip with decent framerate (some tearing occasionally) and no flashing or odd graphical glitches, so at least the game is playable.

Flynn
You are awesome! Thanks so much for the update. Please let me know if you can find a fix. I tried everything I could think of to no avail. Very strange "bug" -- I thought maybe it was Windows 8.1 causing the issue but when my Windows 7 laptop did the same thing, I was stumped.
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digitalforce: You are awesome! Thanks so much for the update. Please let me know if you can find a fix. I tried everything I could think of to no avail. Very strange "bug" -- I thought maybe it was Windows 8.1 causing the issue but when my Windows 7 laptop did the same thing, I was stumped.
Yeah, apparently this has been an ongoing issue for nVidia Optimus for a long time. Some games just don't switch over for whatever reason. Not entirely certain nVidia is to blame, or Intel, or just older (and some newer) programs don't poll past the first graphics chip found. *shrug*

I'll keep looking as I have time. =)

Flynn
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digitalforce: You are awesome! Thanks so much for the update. Please let me know if you can find a fix. I tried everything I could think of to no avail. Very strange "bug" -- I thought maybe it was Windows 8.1 causing the issue but when my Windows 7 laptop did the same thing, I was stumped.
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FlynnArrowstarr: Yeah, apparently this has been an ongoing issue for nVidia Optimus for a long time. Some games just don't switch over for whatever reason. Not entirely certain nVidia is to blame, or Intel, or just older (and some newer) programs don't poll past the first graphics chip found. *shrug*

I'll keep looking as I have time. =)

Flynn
Forgot to reply. On my AMD system, the Intel HD is fine, not 60 FPS but fine. On my 960M system, it's super slow and laggy on the Intel integrated which is strange. Annoying for sure!
I have the same issue with Trails, it defaults to my integrated card instead of the 960. Im running windows 10. The intel chip is the 4600/
I haven't run the game yet so I don't know if it will be buggy or not. Please let us know if someone finds a fix.
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fathem: I have the same issue with Trails, it defaults to my integrated card instead of the 960. Im running windows 10. The intel chip is the 4600/
I haven't run the game yet so I don't know if it will be buggy or not. Please let us know if someone finds a fix.
Getting to this late, but there was a patch for Trails awhile back that fixed the screen flashing with the Intel HD graphics. Seems to play just fine now.

Flynn
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fathem: I have the same issue with Trails, it defaults to my integrated card instead of the 960. Im running windows 10. The intel chip is the 4600/
I haven't run the game yet so I don't know if it will be buggy or not. Please let us know if someone finds a fix.
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FlynnArrowstarr: Getting to this late, but there was a patch for Trails awhile back that fixed the screen flashing with the Intel HD graphics. Seems to play just fine now.

Flynn
It plays for me as well but for the life of me I can't get it to run the 960.
I have the 4600 and it will freeze up sometimes I'd really rather run the 960. I have the gog patch 2.1.0.9 applied.
Is there another patch outside of the gog environment that I need to apply?

Thanks for any assistance.
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fathem: It plays for me as well but for the life of me I can't get it to run the 960.
I have the 4600 and it will freeze up sometimes I'd really rather run the 960. I have the gog patch 2.1.0.9 applied.
Is there another patch outside of the gog environment that I need to apply?

Thanks for any assistance.
Hi, fathem.

I haven't been able to find anything out about it so far. Just seems like some applications completely ignore the setting in the nVidia control panel. Arcanum is another game that immediately switches back to the Intel chip. I've done a ton of searching through Google, but haven't found much. If I do find anything I'll post it here.

Flynn
Holy necroposting, Batman!

I don't have a solution for this, I'm afraid, but I came across this thread while researching on the same issue and, for what it's worth, I realized that this happens for all games that run in 4:3 as opposed to my lappie's native 16:9. More details in this other thread I opened, since it affects other games as well as this one.
may be my post is of (some) help:


Sacred 1 gold gog version on newer notebook laptop with Win10 :: YES it runs fluently :-)

https://www.gog.com/forum/sacred_series/sacred_gold_on_notebook_laptop_win10_yes

https://www.gog.com/forum/sacred_series/sacred_gold_on_notebook_laptop_win10_yes
Post edited September 02, 2016 by BetinoGog
After all these years the problem still persists.
I have a Dell laptop with a GTX1050 and a HD630; Sacred Gold always selects the Intel one and the performance is very poor (especially zoomed out).

The steps I have takens with no success are:

1) enable ultimate performance in Power options
2) enable high performance mode in Nvidia controla panel (globally and on the specific .exe)
3) enable high performance mode in Windows graphics settings

Is there another way to force this game to use my Nvidia GPU?
I got it to use my dedicated GPU via dgVoodoo2.

1.) Download dgVoodoo2 and unzip.
2.) Copy dgVoodooCpl.exe and dgVoodoo.confg to your Sacred folder. Also copy the contents of the .zip's /MS/x86 folder to your Sacred folder.
3.) Run dgVoodooCpl.exe. Select your dedicated GPU under "Adapter(s) to use/enable" on the General tab. Hit OK.
4.) Run the game.