Is there a setting on a W540 to force it to run on the graphics chip only when plugged?

[CharlieDog]

Just got a W540 and I have a bunch of questions. I have seen posts where other Thinkpads have a setting to disable the integrated graphics, and I was wondering if the W540 had that. At least do that when it was plugged in-which for me is about 95% of the time. TIA

Larry aka CharlieDog

[jursky]

I am not going to say how to disable dedicated GPU, I am here to ask: why?
I am genuinely interested knowing why people are always so keen on disabling d-GPU when they should be only happy they have a d-GPU in their laptops. Compared to i-GPU, d-GPU most of the times crushes (in terms of performance) i-GPU, and I am not speaking about games now, from my experience emulators (in this case Android Emulator) can benefit from d-GPU greatly. Is this some kind of hipster thing to do I don't know about?
Edit: I can understand disabling d-GPU because of e-GPU (I am doing that myself on my W530).
Edit 2: Oh my god, I just re-read the original post and I now realized it was whole time about disabling i-GPU and not disabling d-GPU. Oh well...

[CharlieDog]

My question was not about disabling the dedicated graphics, it was how to force the laptop to USE the dedicated graphics whenever the machine was plugged in.

[jursky]

Ah, sorry, in that case I would just try to click wherever on free spot on desktop and open NVIDIA Control Panel, then I would switch in left explorer menu to Manage 3D Settings and on right side I would switch "Preferred graphics processor" from Auto-select to High performance NVIDIA. That way the d-GPU should be preferred for all 3D applications, however it will apply when on battery too, unless you'll switch it every time yourself. Additionally I would click in top menu on Desktop > Add "Run with graphics processor" to Context menu option so that when you right click an shortcut/exe file you'll have an additional option "Run with graphics processor" (with which you can tell the Windows what GPU specifically should be used for running that app). Available options should be then something like "High performance NVIDIA (default)" and "Integrated graphics".

[DiagonalArg]

@jursky - some OS's don't support dGPU - eg, https://www.qubes-os.org/