Lenovo W520 and Photoshop GPU Enhancements Disabled

After an NVidia update Photoshop CS5 kept complaining "Photoshop has discovered a problem with the display driver and has disabled GPU enhancement." A thread I found suggested to rollback the driver but that was not the correct solution. This other site gave me a clue. Optimus was assigned Intel HD graphics rather than the NVIDIA Quadro 2000M (or 1000M if that's what you have) to Photoshop. Auto is not a bad Global setting but not good for your CUDA enabled Adobe applications. You can customize the settings per program to the NVIDIA Control Panel either via Windows Control Panel or the taskbar applet for Optimus.


Start -> Control Panel -> NVIDIA Control Panel -> 3D Settings -> Program Settings (tab) -> Select A Program To Customize: Add -> Find the exact photoshop.exe path in your Program Files -> Select the preferred graphics processor for this program: High-performance NVIDIA processor -> Apply


Stop and Restart Photoshop. The error should have gone away. You can confirm you are using the NVIDIA graphics card by going to System Info.


Help -> System Info -> Scroll down until you find Video Card: NVIDIA Quadro 2000M (or Intel HD Graphics ... which is the cause of your problem)



Video Card Vendor: Intel
Video Card Renderer: Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
Display: 1
Display Bounds:= top: 0, left: 0, bottom: 1080, right: 1920
Video Card Number: 1
Video Card: NVIDIA Quadro 2000M
Driver Version: 8.17.12.7593
Driver Date: 20110812000000.000000-000
Video Card Driver: nvd3dumx.dll,nvwgf2umx.dll,nvwgf2umx.dll,nvd3dum,nvwgf2um,nvwgf2um
Video Mode:
Video Card Caption: NVIDIA Quadro 2000M
Video Card Memory: -2047 MB
Video Card Number: 1
Video Card: NVIDIA Quadro 2000M


Update: The above appeared to be a symptom of something wrong with the NVIDIA driver update as well. After fixing Photoshop I discovered that After Effects and Premier would fail to start with Sniffer_GPU.exe running a long time before Windows complains. I went through cycles of rollback and patch uninstall of Windows patches. And then putting them back when it didn't work. The final fix was to uninstall the NVIDIA Graphics Driver and rebooting. The reboot automatically reinstalled the graphics software. Another reboot later and the my favorite Adobe apps were all working again.