I believe I found the reason why AMD has dropped the 780M from its mobile graphic drivers, at least, temporarily.
Found this article about how the AMD Graphics driver seriously reduced the 780M performance: https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-radeon-graphics-driver-reduces-performance-by-up-to-33-on-apus/
AMD’s graphics driver team is going through a rough patch. After failing to run Rachet and Clank with ray-tracing, Team Red released a broken “certified” driver. The Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 23.7.2 WHQL was taken down as it drastically worsened performance on iGPUs while also disrupting connected I/O devices.
The Radeon 780M is the most powerful iGPU found on the Ryzen 7000 “Phoenix” mobile processors. After installing this particular driver, it experienced a drop of 33%, falling to Radeon 760 levels of performance. Consequently, a lot of handheld consoles using the 780M were also affected. Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition went from 33 FPS to just 22 FPS following the update.
In addition to performance reductions, several I/O devices also stopped working after the update was installed. External devices like sound cards, fingerprint readers, and even Xbox controllers completely stopped working after the driver was installed.
Luckily, AMD was quick to take down the driver and provide users with a hotfix. It’s worth noting that these drivers stay in “Beta” for several days before being rolled out as WHQL.
From Tom's Hardware concerning the same issue: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adrenalin-23-7-2-marks-return-bad-amd-drivers
The internet has often blamed AMD for bad graphics drivers, but according to @carygolomb on Twitter, that supposed reputation might be returning to haunt the company. The Twitter user reported that updating to Adrenalin driver 23.7.2 caused GPU performance to tank on his handheld gaming device and re-branded his Radeon 780M integrated GPU to the much slower 760M. On top of this, the user also reported issues with some internal and external devices no longer functioning with the new driver active, including his fingerprint reader, sound card, and Xbox 360 game controller.
To back up the user's claims, Digital Foundry replied to his Tweet confirming the bad performance problems with the new driver. According to the review outlet, one of its Aya Neo handheld gaming consoles sporting a Ryzen 7 7840U lost 33% of its gaming performance while running the new driver, going from 33 FPS to an unplayable 22 FPS in Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition.
These issues are among the worst AMD-related graphics driver issues we've come across in a long time. Usually, AMD's GPU drivers are very reliable and don't have significant problems. But, with the dozens and dozens of driver updates that AMD pumps out year after year, a dud was bound to pop out at some point.
On top of these issues, the official list of known problems with 23.7.2 is also somewhat high for a fully-released WHQL Adrenalin driver. Some of these additional problems include high idle power consumption on RX 7000 series GPUs — which was supposed to be fixed by now, performance metrics overlay not fully working in some games, and the widely known Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart ray-tracing crashes that we talked about two days ago.
With how new the driver is, it is impossible to tell how widespread the performance issues are. But for now, it seems to be heavily affecting AMD's mobile Ryzen 7000 series processors, with nobody talking about these bugs with desktop Radeon graphics cards. Modern RX 7000 series GPUs seem unaffected, with Ancient Gameplays reporting slightly better gaming performance in some titles compared to the last driver.
