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[mental_darkness]

Hi,

I have the HD 7970M running with the latest AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta Driver (also tried the stable ones from Clevo and the 12.6 WHQL), but unfortunately the graphic switching still causes many issues with some games, for example:

Dirt 3, Crysis Warhead, Dirt Showdown, Battlefield 3, and many more...

I understand that the technology is still new and that the drivers must come from the manufacturer (on my case Clevo), but the hardware you made is amazing so please consider on adding the following suggestions to the software:

1- Add a global option to the OS solely take advantage of the integrated or dedicated graphics unit, for example on Battery, the global option could be the integrated GPU but when plugged in, it could be dedicated GPU (on my case HD 7970M) or Automatic which is managed by the list of decisions made by the user (see the 2nd suggestion). If you choose the dedicated graphics card as standard, all games would be directly related to the AMD GPU start, this could save the standard user lots of issues and questions.

2- List of all the applications where the decisions between "Power Saver" or "High Performance" were made, not only the most recent applications... it's confusing and time consuming.

3-Allow the user, when launching an application, to easily right-click and choose the desired graphic card or a similar feature. This will reduce frustration, be less time consuming and much better than the popup that appears.

4-Improve the GPU % usage on more demanding games, like Dirt 3, Battlefield 3 and Crysis.

I'm not asking to deliver all this suggestions at once, because it takes time to develop a good software but right now lots of consumers are running away from AMD because of lack of "software support".

Thank you,

Best Regards to all,

João Machado

[ishikaroi]

Thanks for the good usefull thread!

[mental_darkness]

Another suggestion (maybe impossible...):

As far as I know due to the new zero-core technology and how PowerXpress 5.0 works, the card (HD 7970M) even in the middle of a frame will power-down parts of the card that aren't being used when used in a switchable configuration, this can lead to the utilization graph bouncing all around. If I'm wrong please explain the concepts

So my suggestion would be that the AMD's drivers/software detect the actual framerate and if it's lower than 60 (although it's just an example,indeed most players aim for this framerate) force the GPU to not power-down or increase the timeout for it to happen. An example for this are the dual/quad core CPUs on mobile phones that usually the 2nd core powers-down when not needed but the expert user (in this case will be AMD software), can change when and also the timeout for this to happen.

My knowledge about GPUs is very limited so I maybe be saying something stupid...

Thank you,

Best Regards to all