I hope your top answer ends up being true because Samsung is notoriously bad at providing software updates for all of their hardware. I thought I could avoid the issue with a laptop since it ran on Windows, but apparently the manufacturer has more driver control than I imagined.
I will answer all of your questions, but I have one I need to ask: why would setting my GPU Workload in Global Settings from "Graphics" to "Compute" allow my Radeon 540 to reach its boost clock speed during gaming? After reading about Crossfire issues with Intel graphics, I took a chance and changed to the "Compute" option under GPU workload and all of a sudden I am seeing 1124MHz as the clock speed being reached by the GPU in game. Now I am seeing the GPU still being under-utilized because the GPU load in the log attached below fluctuates wildly in game no matter what settings I try. But the log also shows that I am finally attaining the boost speed advertised by the hardware.
As for your questions:
Do you have any yellow marks in Device Manager?
- No, I've sorted out all hardware drivers and device functionality. All hardware is recognized and all of Samsung's software drivers are considered "up to date" based on their own software update tool (Samsung SW Update). It's disappointing that they released version 17.12 of the AMD software last year and there has been zero updates since then for Intel or AMD.
Is your computer power plan set to 'Performance'? (not 'balanced')
- There was no "High Performance" mode available in power plans, however I created one then re-tested and the GPU load and clock speeds were still all over the place.
Have you set the graphics choices correctly?
- AMD Software successfully detected the Star Wars game and assigned it a profile set to high performance so it is shown to run using the discrete GPU. On that note, however, I did go into Power Plan and attempt to set the graphics to "Force power saving graphics" on battery and what I am seeing under GPU-Z is that despite being on battery I am seeing the 540 turn on randomly just idle in Windows between 200-400MHz for a few seconds. That's leaving the device idle and still seeing spikes from the discrete GPU where I believe the iGPU should be the only device running.
Have you disabled any 'power saving' program...example:'cool and quite'?
- No programs like this exist on my laptop because I wiped the drive and re-installed Windows 10 Pro without any of the Samsung software. After the clean install I put back the Samsung Software Update tool and ensured I was still getting mandatory updates without all the background applications pre-installed with their version Windows.
Are you expecting too much?
- I have two expectations: the first is that the GPU load remain at least mostly consistent and that the GPU clock rates not fluctuate wildly so that I can get a sense of GPU performance; regardless of what level of performance that is.
- The second expectation is that the discrete GPU not cause the lag I'm seeing when the UAC prompt comes up or the hanging of programs due to GPU handoff. I can verify partly that this is caused by the hand-off by disabling the discrete GPU in Device Manager and perform all normal Windows tasks without lag using the iGPU. I don't know what is causing the issues I'm experiencing, but I imagine that there is some kind of settings error that exists between Windows power settings, Samsung power settings, and AMD power settings.
Thank you for your patience and help with this.
