acer aspire 3 laptop vega 8 + radeon 535 2gb GDDR5

[airstrike]

Hello, i just bought an Acer laptop with ryzen 5 2500u cpu, it's equipped with the built-in vega 8 graphics + dedicated Radeon 535 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, which seems like a weird combination as on paper the vega 8 seems stronger than the dedicated graphics, i'm having lots of problems dealing with drivers as i can't switch between the two graphics cards as all the programs run by default on the Vega 8, when i try to install amd adrenalin or even the drivers from Acer's website, the screen turns black and i have to restart the laptop and reload in safe mode to uninstall it then things go back to normal with laptop only working on built-in graphics vega 8.
1) do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this problem?
2) what do you think the purpose behind Acer choice of adding a week dedicated graphics along with the stronger built-in vega 8!!! i can't help but think that maybe in the near future there will be a new driver that utilizes dual graphics/crossfire, in this case, it would make sense because i think just adding GDDR5 to vega 8 will make a huge impact

 

[airstrike]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from airstrike : "laptop vega 8 + radeon 535 2GB GDDR5"

Hello, i just bought an Acer laptop with ryzen 5 2500u cpu, it's equipped with the built-in vega 8 graphics + dedicated Radeon 535 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, which seems like a weird combination as on paper the vega 8 seems stronger than the dedicated graphics, i'm having lots of problems dealing with drivers as i can't switch between the two graphics cards as all the programs run by default on the Vega 8, when i try to install amd adrenalin or even the drivers from Acer's website, the screen turns black and i have to restart the laptop and reload in safe mode to uninstall it then things go back to normal with laptop only working on built-in graphics vega 8.
1) do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this problem?
2) what do you think the purpose behind Acer choice of adding a week dedicated graphics along with the stronger built-in vega 8!!! i can't help but think that maybe in the near future there will be a new driver that utilizes dual graphics/crossfire, in this case, it would make sense because i think just adding GDDR5 to vega 8 will make a huge impact

 

[rgd1101]

Please stick with 1 thread and not spam the forum

 

[richarddedal]

Hi @airstrike,
I have the exact same laptop that you have, perhaps we cannot assume that Vega 8 is much stronger than Radeon 535. Although benchmarks are showing that Vega 8 is performing better. Perhaps in some cases, yes, Vega 8 has its advantages and disadvantages and Radeon 535 as well. Benchmark results are sometimes unreliable, we can only measure a GPU's true performance by executing a realtime usage, how would GPU performs in a work load like gaming and rendering.
Vega 8 has 512 shader cores whereas Radeon 535 has 1980 shader cores (according to GPU-Z). As for the clockrate, Vega 8 has a higher clock speed compared to Radeon 535.
Vega 8 shares the system memory RAM, so Vega 8's clockspeed depends on the RAM's clock speed and TDP will also depend if the CPU is not on its full load.
Radeon 535 on the other hand, has its own memory of 2048 with GDDR5 type memory. Eventhoug it is still manufactured in 28nm (compared to Vega 8's 14nm process), it is inferior. Keep it in mind that discrete graphics cards are more stronger compared to integrated gpu's for some reasons. The crossfire is disabled by default and we cannot choose what GPU we should use in each application. Vega 8 is used as default graphics card for lighter applications like watching movies, editing photos and some other stuff. The radeon 535 is dedicated to those applications that needs intensive graphics requirements like heavy gaming, video editing, video rendering, photo rendering etc. The system automatically detects if an application needs the power of the radeon 535 or it only needs the default vega 8. If you want to use the full capabilities of the radeon 535, always set your power option to "High Performance" then the system would be idling the Vega 8 for most of the time as radeon 535 is on demand...