NVidia Optimus (GTX00M) Cannot Run in Fullscreen Mode

Hey -- Just hoping this will help folks with NVIDIA cards and problems.  I have 2 machines BOTH high end and running NVIDIA cards.

Machine 1 is a desktop with AMD FX 8 core 4+Ghz processor

NVIDIA GTX660TI 4Gb Manufacturer max clocked

16Gb RAM,

etc, etc...

Machine 2 is an ASUS ROG gaming laptop with an Intel Core I7 and a GTX765m discreet graphics card.

Both machines have Windows 8.1 with dual boot into Windows 7, and I have all of my games installed so that I can play under either OS.  

As for displays, the laptop uses it's built-in panel or an external HDMI connected monitor at 1920x1080 60Hz, and the desktop uses mainly an ASUS PG278Q running at 2560x1440 144Hz.

I had pretty much playing Inquisition exclusively, and other than the "little things" that many other posts on the boards address, I hadn't had any problems with the game running. Now, I generally run games including Inquisition on these beasts of mine at the absolute maximum settings - in fact, I usually even set the NVIDIA control panel to "enhance program features" so that games that are older and don't support certain settings get the advantages of all that hardware - and I never had trouble until after two things occurred:  Inquisition patch 3 and NVIDIA driver 347.52.  Suddenly I was having constant crashes, neither machine would play the game in full screen - it would pop up with black screen and then crash to the desktop, etc.

I messed with all possible combinations of settings available both through the NVIDIA control panel and through the game.  Windowed Full screen mode would, indeed work, but it didn't take advantage of the capabilities of my hardware and was not an acceptable solution.  I alternately enabled and disabled software I had running in the background.  I even went so far as to attempt a "clean boot" with nothing running in the background except what was necessary to my hardware.  STILL no joy.  In a fit of frustration, I quit playing Inquisition for a few days and fired up a couple of other favourites.  I suddenly discovered that they were ALL having the issue that attempting to play in full screen would cause an immediate crash to desktop.

So... one would think that if the problems appear to be the same even with such disparate hardware, and it's not just a problem with one game or even one company's games, then it's almost certainly got to be a driver issue.

After digging though numerous posts in several dozen different forums about issues with Inquisition AND with other games, and poking around in the support forums associated with my hardware, I discovered that it DOES appear to be a driver issue more than an issue with a particular game.  So after going half mad with frustration and contributing significant loads of wood for several of the fires burning in the NVIDIA hardware and driver developer forums, I thought I'd share the answer that finally appeared.  I guess the NVIDIA devs finally got annoyed with the rest of us. ;-)

The solution on BOTH machines turned out to be this:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/82578/en-us

That is a link to the NVIDIA Game Ready driver 345.20 which was released 2.24.2015 amusingly enough, and it even specifically refers to Dragon Age: Inquisition in it's references to game play improvements.

I performed a CLEAN install of that driver (Just the display drivers - the PhysX and such are NOT part of the problem) on both machines, rebooted, and voila! I have not had a single video driver related crash since, and both machines are back to playing in full-screen mode with no complaints at all.

Oh, and an additional PS since these have been mentioned in here --

I have all sorts of persistent stuff that runs in the background ALL the time, such as Razer Cortex for my mouse, Teamviewer, Splashtop, VNC, RemoteView, iCloud...  etc, etc...  Since the driver update, I can confirm that all my games including this one run full-screen even with everything else going in the background. 

I don't know if this will help everyone, but it cured both of my machines, and I can also confirm it as a fix for several other people with NVIDIA cards who were having full-screen issues with other games besides Inquisition.

I'm not certain just what this driver does differently from the other one, but I can tell you that the discussions in the NVIDIA developer forums are pretty hot and heavy about it all.  There are a bunch of us who are trying to pin NVIDIA down about hardware capabilities...  ;-)

Good luck!

dgman94.

Have you actually tried different resolution other than your native resolution?

Try 1366x768. You will see that it is still on 1920x1080, coz that's your native resolution, and it is still on windowed mode.

"Bro as i said , you can change the resolution from that text file as well
just change it to whatever maximum resolution your screen can display ... "

Please at least read my post before replying... ☹️

This is what I said: "The problem is that people with certain cards or displays, cannot run the game well at maximum resolution. (For example if you have a 4k display...)"

So setting it to maximum resolution does not fix the problem, and in fact makes it worse, like I said.

And if you change the resolution in that text file, it doesn't do anything at all, same as the options menu.

Your "fix" of editing that text file doesn't do anything at all, in fact. It only sets it to "full screen windowed" which is available in the options menu, and you do not need to edit a text file at all to do that.

Go back through the thread, over and over people keep saying "oh, setting it to full screen windowed fixes it for me!" But that is not actually the problem we are talking about. People keep thinking that is the solution but for many of us it is not a solution and makes it worse.