Issues with Movie Render Queue on a 4090 Laptop

Development Rendering
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Hello!

I am a freelance concert visual designer and I create music videos in unreal engine. I travel a lot so I decided to invest in a fully loaded laptop. I am using UE 5.3.

Everything has been great throughout the whole animation pipeline. So much so that I stopped using my previous tower PC workstation all together (3070 GPU). However, I am rendering out a music video right now and I feel that the movie render que is acting really weird.

The Issue:
When I go to render things out in MRQ it seems to be going unusually slow.
Even when:
-keeping the resolution at 1920 x 1080
-lowering anti aliasing spatial sample count to 1 and temporal to 8.
-I have checked my temperatures and they are hovering at 89 C or below for the most part, occasional spikes over 90.
-I updated my drivers to the latest NVIDIA Studio drivers.

I have seen people suggest making sure epic games is utilizing the laptop 4090 rather than the integrated gpu, but nobody has gone into detail on how to do that in the NVIDIA Control panel 3D settings. Let me know if anyone has any idea why this might be happening, i feel like with the hardware I am using it should be way way way faster, but it’s taking like 10-20 minutes to render a simple 4 second scene whereas my old PC would rip through that in about a minute or less… Trying to move to 4K and higher render settings for the final renders, but those frames hardly budge.

Laptop Specs:

Sager NP9371W Notebook

  • Intel Core i9-13900HX Processor
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU with 16GB GDDR6 Video Memory
  • 64GB Dual Channel DDR5 SDRAM at 5200MHz - 2 X 32GB
  • 4TB WD Black SN850X M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD
  • 2TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD
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well… hello laptop user. have you checked if it’s actually using the 4090? like… taskmanager can show you basic gpu and video memory utilisation and preferably the temps.

also… nvcpl? it’s working like this. add program, set preferred gpu and apply. jsyk… as you can see, on my system (w10 22h2) it’s defaulting to internal and still uses the 3060 i got, anyway. it’s a laptop too btw. it has old school optimus v1 (the internal being the host). optimus v2 may be switching gpus on your end. this is reportedly a rather bad option to have in some cases.

and… just in case it refuses to work you have the windows button in the nvcpl and can enforce applications to specific devices via windows settings.

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if all fails you should be able to disable the igpu via bios/uefi to enforce the mux switch to default to the 4090, with no switchable graphics.