I have an Asus N53S 6Gb / 1080 laptop with 540M and Phoenix failed to detect Nvidia GPU.
My solution: download 540M graphics driver and utilities from nvidia website.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-280.26-whql-driver.html
Then change nvidia setting (control panel) from 'let program decide' to 'always use nvidia' or something like that. I changed nothing in the phoenix preferences.
All works like charm now, no problems anymore.
Hope this helps. Have fun.