HP Pavilion GTX 1650 can't play games.

Hello,

My friend recently brought a HP Pavilion (specs below), I'm posting on his behalf as he doesn't use forums and all. Any game he tries to play lags a lot, even GTA 5 at low and 720p in windowed mode lags. Valorant works fine for him. I figured it'd be because the laptop isn't using the GTX 1650 but he says he has tried all the things listed online but to no avail. Also he mentions that his bios is somewhat different than what's in the online articles about this forum. Any advise please? He wasn't expecting to play a lot of games on this but GTA 5 also not working is something else right.

Specs Below -

Ryzen 5 3550H
GTX 1650
8GB RAM
1TB HDD

Model Number 15-ec0100AX

Ask him to install msi afterburner and monitor GPU usage. And in nvidia control panel, he needs to set 1650 as preferred GPU for each game.

GTX 1650 is set as the preferred GPU. I'll ask him to install afterburner

That's definitely powerful enough for GTA V & like almost all games out there.

Try these:
- Play in fullscreen mode in GTA to begin with
- Open Task Manager > Performance tab > check GPU 0 & 1 usage while gaming ( GPU 0 should be Integrated Vega one & GPU 1 is 1650). Also check HDD usage, maybe it's lagging because HDD usage is at 100%. If HDD usage is 100%, just get SSD & move OS to it. Win10 isn't exactly that smooth in HDD these days IMO.
- Update Nvidia drivers
- Check if laptop is running in AC power, battery mode throttles CPU & GPU
- Check in some HP software (Command Centre?) if the laptop is in silent mode, which in many cases throttles CPU & GPU to control heat. Keep it in balanced or performance.

Ask him to disable the IGPU using device manager. Doom Eternal doesn't work on my cousin's laptop with IGPU on some reason. So this is the work around.

omega44-xt said:
That's definitely powerful enough for GTA V & like almost all games out there.

Try these:
- Play in fullscreen mode in GTA to begin with
- Open Task Manager > Performance tab > check GPU 0 & 1 usage while gaming ( GPU 0 should be Integrated Vega one & GPU 1 is 1650). Also check HDD usage, maybe it's lagging because HDD usage is at 100%. If HDD usage is 100%, just get SSD & move OS to it. Win10 isn't exactly that smooth in HDD these days IMO.
- Update Nvidia drivers
- Check if laptop is running in AC power, battery mode throttles CPU & GPU
- Check in some HP software (Command Centre?) if the laptop is in silent mode, which in many cases throttles CPU & GPU to control heat. Keep it in balanced or performance.

GPU 0 is GTX 1650 and GPU 1 is Vega Graphics for him, in device manager it shows that GPU 1 is being used ~2% and GPU 0 is idle at 0%.
Also, he has 8GB RAM but in task manager it shows only 5.9GB available, of which 5GGB is used. HDD usage is around 25%.

He has set the preferred GPU to1650 in nVidia Control Panel but still games run on Vega Graphics.

He tried disabling the iGPU, which resulted in display loss.

adityak469 said:
GPU 0 is GTX 1650 and GPU 1 is Vega Graphics for him, in device manager it shows that GPU 1 is being used ~2% and GPU 0 is idle at 0%.
Also, he has 8GB RAM but in task manager it shows only 5.9GB available, of which 5GGB is used. HDD usage is around 25%.

He has set the preferred GPU to1650 in nVidia Control Panel but still games run on Vega Graphics.

He tried disabling the iGPU, which resulted in display loss.

The nvidia drivers isn't installed properly i guess. When I disabled the IGPU in my cousin's laptop, there was no display loss. He too has a AMD processor with Vega IGPU and a Nvidia 1050 dGPU.

Stormbringer said:
The nvidia drivers isn't installed properly i guess. When I disabled the IGPU in my cousin's laptop, there was no display loss. He too has a AMD processor with Vega IGPU and a Nvidia 1050 dGPU.

I'll ask him to reinstall the drivers

EDIT: Just realized that other have mentioned the same. When I first got the laptop I had the same issues. But setting the prefered gpu did the trick.

Laptop display is always connected to the iGPU. When gaming the nvidia gpu passes the signal through the iGPU.

This is my HP Omen nvidia setting page.

Goto this page and for a game select which gpu to use.

you can also use the global settings to always use the nVidia gpu, but the will consume more power even when not gaming.

also if he is running on battery then he might see that the fps is locked to 30. this is due to a setting in the nVidia control panel, I cannot recall the name of this setting.

RCuber said:
EDIT: Just realized that other have mentioned the same. When I first got the laptop I had the same issues. But setting the prefered gpu did the trick.

Laptop display is always connected to the iGPU. When gaming the nvidia gpu passes the signal through the iGPU.

This is my HP Omen nvidia setting page.
View attachment 19929
Goto this page and for a game select which gpu to use.
View attachment 19931
you can also use the global settings to always use the nVidia gpu, but the will consume more power even when not gaming.
View attachment 19932

also if he is running on battery then he might see that the fps is locked to 30. this is due to a setting in the nVidia control panel, I cannot recall the name of this setting.

Thanks for the reply, his setting are the same as you have shown, I've attached the pictures of the same.
PhysX is set to 1650 and Global preferred graphics processor is set to High Performance NVIDIA processor.

adityak469 said:
Thanks for the reply, his setting are the same as you have shown, I've attached the pictures of the same.
PhysX is set to 1650 and Global preferred graphics processor is set to High Performance NVIDIA processor.

check program settings tab, select a game and set the preferred processor.

Maybe try a different game & see what happens.

RCuber said:
check program settings tab, select a game and set the preferred processor.

Okay I'll tell him to do that, will update soon

omega44-xt said:
Maybe try a different game & see what happens.

It's the same for all games, he can't run apex too, neither Warzone
Valorant and CSGO work fine though.(not too tasking for the iGPU)

RCuber said:
EDIT: Just realized that other have mentioned the same. When I first got the laptop I had the same issues. But setting the prefered gpu did the trick.

Laptop display is always connected to the iGPU. When gaming the nvidia gpu passes the signal through the iGPU.

This is my HP Omen nvidia setting page.
View attachment 19929
Goto this page and for a game select which gpu to use.
View attachment 19931
you can also use the global settings to always use the nVidia gpu, but the will consume more power even when not gaming.
View attachment 19932

also if he is running on battery then he might see that the fps is locked to 30. this is due to a setting in the nVidia control panel, I cannot recall the name of this setting.

Could you please check if your bios has an option to switch the GPU? He said he saw in an article somewhere that it's there but sadly it's not available in his bios

adityak469 said:
Could you please check if your bios has an option to switch the GPU? He said he saw in an article somewhere that it's there but sadly it's not available in his bios

No, the bios is very restricted

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6000 using Tapatalk

RCuber said:
check program settings tab, select a game and set the preferred processor.

Done. No changes. Any help?

adityak469 said:
Done. No changes. Any help?

Have you selected game to run on nvidia gpu on a per game basis? Also do the same from settings -> display -> graphics settings from power savings to high performance.

adityak469 said:
Done. No changes. Any help?

I am not sure about it anymore as the above comments are the common steps/solutions for this problem.
Ask him to do complete shutdown and check.(not just restart)
He can also try a power cycle,, but i'm not sure if it would matter( i.e., shutdown the laptop, disconnect all devices and power, hold power button for 15 seconds and then power on).

Also check Radeon Settings Lite app which should be installed by default.
Also check if any HP gaming related software is installed, mine comes with Omen Gaming Hub, it allows you to switch profiles. This is also available in Microsoft Store for download.

Okay so we figured it out I guess, the GPU being used is GTX 1650, in HP Omen, it shows ~35% GPU Usage, ~55% and RAM is 90+% when GTA is lagging.
My friend has 8GB RAM installed but only 5.9GB is available for usage. I'm thinking this could be the problem. Any suggestions?

Does he have an outdated BIOS on his laptop? If so, ask him to update to the latest BIOS and set it to default settings. Also tell him to open BIOS and check if there are any settings that conflict with video card or RAM installed. Reinstall the latest NVIDIA driver and other drivers for the Radeon GPU if required. Set the driver settings to default and run the game. Check if NVIDIA card is being used after launch.

adityak469 said:
Okay so we figured it out I guess, the GPU being used is GTX 1650, in HP Omen, it shows ~35% GPU Usage, ~55% and RAM is 90+% when GTA is lagging.
My friend has 8GB RAM installed but only 5.9GB is available for usage. I'm thinking this could be the problem. Any suggestions?

Might be possible but GTA V is an old game, I assume you are trying to run SP.

2GB RAM gets allocated for iGPU.

Finally it's working. It was some faulty GPU drivers. We reinstalled the drivers for both the GPU which fixed the issue! Thanks everyone for the help!