Gray Icons?

[olds442]

my laptop has this same  problem when i try and play the frame rate screen is gray and so are icons. its got a nvida 540m 1gb. i think its a HW bug or somehting

[Hawk78th]

I've been working with Blazer65 on this...& I know he has this:

 

HPDV7 6C00  
{Specs copied from HP site}
Internal specs
Operating system
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit


Processor
2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2430M Processor (2.4 GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) Turbo Boost to 3.0 GHz OR
2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M Processor (2.5 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz)

Graphics
Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 [HDMI, VGA]
1GB AMD Radeon(TM) HD 7470M GDDR5 Discrete Graphics(TM) [HDMI, VGA]



Once I saw the Video chip... I didn'tknow where esle to go but to suggest he send Skuzzy the DXDIAG  and have you sort it out....

 any Ideas...  Skuzzy ?

 THX for the help  !

[Skuzzy]

Sure, get rid of the onboard video chips.  There is not much we can do about these anomalies.  These chips contain a subset of the hardware features the game relies upon in drawing 3D graphics.

Sometimes it helps to reduce the loads on them.  Such as disabling the Aero desktop in Windows 7, in the game disable all the "Advanced" graphic features, set the "Maximum Texture Size" to 256, or less and go from there.

It is also imperative to stay on top of the video drivers for these chips, especially the Intel ones.

[bozon]

Many new laptops have the dual display chips. The intel one is supposed to handle the 2D graphics and the Nvidia does the 3D stuff. I have no idea how they are glued together, but they are reported to work well in most modern games.

I too have a new Dell laptop with such a dual system and suffer from icons turning gray. Drivers are the latest for both Intel and Nvidia. I'll try to lower some setting as suggested and see if it has any effect.

Dell XPS 14z
Intel HD graphics 3000 driver 8.15.10.2696
NVIDIA GeForce GT520M driver 8.17.13.142

[bozon]

Problem solved.

for those with "optimus" video cards (laptops that have both an intel and NVIDIA chips), you need to open the NVIDIA setpup in your system tray and from there select the NVIDIA chip as the primary. It is not recomended to set it in the global setting as it will eat your battery faster but do it per-program instead.

[blazer65]

Problem solved.

for those with "optimus" video cards (laptops that have both an intel and NVIDIA chips), you need to open the NVIDIA setpup in your system tray and from there select the NVIDIA chip as the primary. It is not recomended to set it in the global setting as it will eat your battery faster but do it per-program instead.

Yes!!  This worked.  Hawk and I figured out that the default must be for a program to run on the lower powered card, so we switched Aces High to run as "High Performance", which must switch it to me Radeon chip, and now everything is working great.

Thank you so much for the help everyone.  Its so nice to be able to see immediately whats flying around me.