Hi there! First time here. Will do my best to keep it concise as possible. Pardon shortcomings.
I own a Samsung Series 7 700Z5A laptop with two GPUs; a discrete AMD 6770M (chipset labeled as 6600M and 6700M) and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000. As the title implies, I am having trouble getting the discrete GPU to work as expected (switching to handle resourse-intensive tasks). In fact, under Graphics options in Settings, the IGPU is seen as both the power-saving and high-performance GPU.
Things I have tried so far:
I have set power settings, both in Power options (Advanced > Switchable graphics) and in AMD's Catalyst Control manager, to Maximum performance. Problem still persists. I tried disabling the IGPU to somewhat force the PC to use the discrete GPU. However, doing so only made the PC use Microsoft Basic Display renderer, even though the discrete GPU was present and working properly (as stated in Device manager). By the way, there is no option in BIOS to do that either, neither is there a "fixed" or "dynamic" switchable graphics option as I have seen in some screenshots.
In safe mode, I have used AMD's cleanup utility and DDU to remove all drivers and driver software, and installed fresh drivers from AMD driver website. Tried Catalyst and the most recent Crimson Beta for legacy graphics hardware. Problem still persists. Also downloaded and ran a bunch of info reporting tools. HWMonitor detects the IGPU but not the discrete card. However, other information reporting tools, namely HWInfo and GPU-Z are able to provide quite substantial information about the discrete card.
One thing I noticed that's particularly odd. After using MSI Afterburner to monitor GPU usage and MSI Kombustor to run stress tests, I noticed that except during stress tests, discrete GPU usage was ALWAYS at 0%, but the temp was at 60°C. During stress tests however, usage was at 98% with temps hovering around the same 60°C - 65°C range. It's probably worth mentioning that Kombustor DID NOT detect the card, though Afterburner did.
Am I missing something? Are there other drivers/software I have to download to get the discrete graphics to be used by the system? Could the cause be something else unrelated to graphics issues? Any help, suggestions and comments will be very appreciated at this point. Would gladly provide more info if requested. Thanks in advance!
PC specifications
OS: Windows 10 Pro version 1903
Processor: Intel Core i5 2450M
RAM: 1x 4GB
VRAM: 1GB dedicated (Discrete GPU)
AMD Driver version: 15.301.1901.0
Catalyst CC version: 15.8
Intel HD driver version: 9.17.10.4229
