Shockingly Poor Performance from New Laptop

[Tojara]

Okay. So I made this thread like 2 hours ago but I tried to edit it. Because I'm a new member it was marked as spam and deleted so I was told to repost it. Here it is.

Specs on the Laptop. More avaliable on the BestBuy page.
Processor: AMD A8-4500M
RAM: 8GB No speed is listed on the site, but from what I can tell in CPUZ it's probably 800MHz
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7640G + 7670M Dual Switchable Graphics


I bought a laptop about a week ago for when I go to school. I figured a laptop would come in handy but have never owned one before. Everything looked nice on this one. Quad core CPU, should have no trouble in game. 8GB RAM, they don't tell you the speed but what ever. Hmmm 'Dual Graphics'. Well a 2GB dedicated chip. Seems solid. Should have no trouble at a 1366x768 resolution on low settings. Or so I thought.

So I've tried gaming on the laptop for the past few days. And the frame rates are shockingly bad... What the hell. This is awful. Starcraft2 plays under 60 on low everything and in a battle drops to a bit above 20. Diablo3 does a little better but not by much... A little under 30 when there are things going on. Dota2 doesn't list a frame rate but I tried a game and was experiencing a lot of lag on the lowest of settings. Whats wrong here?

I've configured all these applications to run under 'High Performance' mode in the switchable graphics application. This means they should use the dedicated GPU right? Well if they are that's pathetic. I checked the card out on notebookcheck and should be getting around 40fps maybe more in most games on low settings at my resolution (1366x768). Is this site wrong and is this chip terrible? Is there something wrong on my end? How can I check that the dedicated chip is being used?

In CPU-Z the graphics tab is acting odd. This is what I'm seeing there. In GPU-Z the program reports a whopping 59GB of Memory on the 7670M chip...


Any ideas guys? I really want this thing to perform... And I definitely don't want to be out $800... Help me out.

I'll keep testing things out and updating.

EDITS
Looks like Starcraft2 doesn't perform better even at lower resolutions. I know the new patch has made the game weird for some people in the performance department so I guess I should leave that one out of my testing.

[sswilson]

I've approved the post, but had to edit out the link as it was pointing somewhere on the hardware canucks website that didn't exist. If you want to include the link, please include it in a later post rather than attempting to edit the original again. :)

I had commented on the original one that my AMD dual gfx laptop defaults down to the low end graphics unless it's plugged in. AFAIK it will not run the higher end graphics by default when you're on battery. Is that possibly your issue?

[Tojara]

Originally Posted by sswilson

I've approved the post, but had to edit out the link as it was pointing somewhere on the hardware canucks website that didn't exist. If you want to include the link, please include it in a later post rather than attempting to edit the original again. :)

I had commented on the original one that my AMD dual gfx laptop defaults down to the low end graphics unless it's plugged in. AFAIK it will not run the higher end graphics by default when you're on battery. Is that possibly your issue?

Very nice. And thank you. Alright sounds good.
I wish it was that simple. I'm plugged in and have been that way for a while. The windows battery task bar application reports that I'm plugged in. AMD's own Control Center also reports that I'm plugged in so I don't think the problem is there.

Going to try out some 3DMark06 benchmarks to see what kind of performance I can get.

[SugarJ]

I hate to say this, but I wouldn't expect good gaming performance out of ANY $800 laptop.

[sswilson]

He's using the low settings though.

[Tojara]

Okay so 3DMark06 seems bad. Here's the results (Trinity Devastator Lite Mobile video card benchmark result - AMD A8-4500M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics,Hewlett-Packard 18A7 score: 7799 3DMarks) I get around 1FPS on the CPU benchmarks... Am I being bottlenecked by my processor? I didn't even realize that was a possible issue with today's tech. Or am I misunderstanding the benchmark here. I'll try some other CPU tests to see if that's it.

Originally Posted by SugarJ

I hate to say this, but I wouldn't expect good gaming performance out of ANY $800 laptop.

Shouldn't I be getting 'playable' performance with this machine though? Looking at the specs and looking at what I'm trying to run it should all be possible... I mean games like diablo3 at low settings in 1366x768? Maybe not I guess.

So the benchmarks from 3DMark06 weren't great. The CPU one was a bit scary (1FPS). I thought my CPU might be bottlenecking me or something. So I ran SuperPI and got what look to be some decent times from it. I realized that the 3DMark benchmark must try to render the whole scene using only the CPU. A hell of a task I'm sure. I got around 20+ fps in most of the intense scenes. That's what I get in important parts of games. It looked like they had much nicer settings then me though. Might be SOL here.

Just for reference here's a picture of the settings I have for Dota2. It still drops to less then 20FPS in fights or when some different stuff is going on.
http://i47.tinypic.com/nnr7gw.png

Originally Posted by SugarJ

I hate to say this, but I wouldn't expect good gaming performance out of ANY $800 laptop.

Originally Posted by sswilson

He's using the low settings though.

I was just going to say this. A laptop with these specs, to my understand, should do better on light gaming like this.

[Soullessone21]

more info there brother, what anti virus you running, what driver set? are you setting games to run with your higher power GPU by right clicking the game and setting the higher GPU, I have played with the older gen a6's with dual GPU's and they rocked, more info and you should see more solutions :)

[Tojara]

I have to remember to not edit posts. As a new user I guess it deletes them. Pretty annoying as I had a fairly decent one all written up tried to add something and its gone. Well nothing that important I guess. In other news when I got the computer I installed rainmeter and set up some skins to be on my desktop. Well I turned it off for once and tried some SC2. In a huge fight performance seemed to be... 'better'. I wasn't getting great fps but it seemed a little higher and was a little more constant. I don't know. Maybe it was a placebo I'll test more tomorrow.

Originally Posted by Soullessone21

more info there brother, what anti virus you running, what driver set? are you setting games to run with your higher power GPU by right clicking the game and setting the higher GPU, I have played with the older gen a6's with dual GPU's and they rocked, more info and you should see more solutions :)

Sorry I don't know what to tell you. Ask for anything though. Using Windows Firewall and Microsoft Security Essentials. You recommend a paid antivirus at all? Hard to find info on AMD drivers but it looks like I'm running "AMD VISION Engine Control Center Version 2012.0321.418.5714". I've done the update and it says everything is the most up to date version. That's what I thought. They should be cool. I hope so.

[Tojara]

Sorry for the Double Post but I don't want to edit and delete the other one. Anyone know of a way I can ensure the dedicated is running at all times. I'm trying stuff in Device Manager but its not going great. The two options I have are "AMD Radeon HD 7640G + 7670M Dual Graphics" and "AMD Radeon 7670M". The first I assume to be simply the integrated under a fancier name and the second to be the dedicated. Is this right? How can I for sure turn the dedicated on? I can't see an option for this in AMD's control center either..

[sswilson]

If you go into the CCC (AMD Vision engine control center) / Power / AMD Power Express you should have the option to select either high performance or power saving GPUs. You should also have an indication of what gpu you're currently running.

Something else I didn't mention about my particular setup is that I have to backtrack several driver packs (or stick with the one from my laptop manufacturer's website) because the latest mobile drivers do not install graphics drivers. If you get into the CCC and you don't see any information WRT your graphics cards it's highly possible that you don't have a driver installed.