I have a Lenovo laptop, AMD A10 5750, Radeon 8650G + 8570M (My laptop memory, which the IGP feeds off of is running at 1866mhz, Hyper X Memory, fastest I've been told it supports) Dual Graphics, However, I have been curious and have been messing around with the switchable graphics settings. I ran benchmarks and played games both with dual graphics on and off… And I have to say… The results are either that the Integrated GPU performs smoother, or on par with the dual graphics on. So my question is, what's the point of the the dual graphics solution, when the performance gain isn't even noticeable? I'm using the latest 14.4 Catalyst Drivers, most of my games run just fine on my integrated 8650G (overclocked) at medium to high settings, so should I just leave the dedicated card off? Or is the 8570m worth using?
Is my integrated graphics card powerful enough on its own?
Guest
The dedicated card is in a dual graphics configuration aka CrossFire. I'm not sure you really can "turn it off"…
tumbleweed_biff
Actually, Dual Graphics is *not* Crossfire. These days you need two discrete video cards for it be to considered crossfire. Integrated graphics + discrete graphics is indeed called "Dual Graphics" by AMD. Keep in mind Dual Graphics doesn't scale anywhere near as well as traditional Crossfire, and it flat out doesn't work in DX9 games. Only DX10 and DX11 games get any benefit. If you're playing a game that uses DX9 only, then there will be very little difference between the integrated GPU and the discrete GPU on your laptop, since they are both about equally powerful.
fodaddy19