Have you set the game to use your GPU in NVIDIA Control Panel?
This is a proposed solution for those of you running into the issue where Nvidia Control Panel ignores your preference settings. In case you have not attempted to select your GPU via Nvidia Control Panel, do that first before proceeding as it is likely your issue. This guide is primarily aimed at those with the persistent issue of Nvidia Control Panel being ignored.
Having tested this game AGAIN to see if I could assist anywhere, I've also noticed that on four separate machines I've ran this game on - the following happened.
- First rig - Intel i7 10700k with Nvidia 3080, 32gb DDR4 RAM loading off an m.2 1TB SSD the game booted, and prioritized the GPU.
- Second rig - Intel i7 13700k with Nvidia 4090, 128gb DDR5 RAM loading off an m.2 1TB SSD (and subsequent 12tb WDBlack), the game prioritized the GPU.
- Third rig - Intel i5 10th Gen with Nvidia 3060ti, 12gb DDR4 RAM loading off an m.2 512gb SSD (and secondary standard SSD) the game prioritized the onboard graphics, ignoring the Nvidia dedicated card.
- Steam Deck OLED model - the game booted, lagged, caused a major crash and ended up locking me out of the SteamOS until I performed a hard restart. Attempting a second time for shits and giggles ended up launching the game, letting me play about 10 minutes with 4:3 resolution before finally crapping out and hitting me back to the SteamOS launcher.
To RESOLVE the issue of the game selecting the onboard GPU, I took the route of going into the bios and disabling the onboard graphics. Your bios may be different, so it would be wise to really check what the settings and effects are. In my case, the laptop is a HP Victus and the onboard graphics are easily toggled on and off using version 1.12.22 of the HP Victus Bios from 2022.
It appears that the game takes what the PC reports as the only graphics device and uses that. I believe it's actually something to do with the fact that when the dedicated GPU is not being utilized, the game launches BEFORE it's being used and thus therefore does no further checks and thus launches using the first graphics device. Again, disabling onboard and preferring the dedicated card on your laptop/PC seems to resolve the issue but be 100% sure that, in case the display turns black you have an external monitor to plug into and change it back. In my case, this did not happen but in older laptops - disabling on the onboard or prioritizing a dedicated device may have adverse effects.