Laptop using Intel HD Graphics instead of Radeon R7 M360, I've tried EVERYTHING

tomlep

Commendable
Jul 7, 2016
2
0
1,510
Why is my laptop using Intel HD Graphics 520 instead of Radeon R7 M360? The R7 M360 appears in Device Manager, and I also have the latest version of drivers downloaded from manufacturer's website. I have tried pretty much everything, and everything says that I am using integrated Graphics, not R7. I also Googled all possible solved cases and none of them helped me. The most frequent solution in there was that R7 is only switched on when using heavier content, but it clearly does not. Using Heaven Benchmark, I was only able to get average FPS of 5-8, with and without the most recent AMD drivers. I tried to monitor heat levels with HWMonitor, but even that does not show my R7. I am getting really frustrated, since this was quite an expensive laptop for my budget, and I'm smashed to the face with this problem. I'd expect everything to work at this price range. I also checked BIOS/UEFI, nothing wrong over there. I also tried a few games with way lower hardware requirements than required, and they were completely unplayable.

I am officially desperate, please help. About to pull my hair off my head.

E: I am aware that this is probably quite common question, but nothing has helped me so far.
 

Colif

Distinguished
Moderator
The frequent solution you found is the correct one, the Radeon is only used when you play games or heavy content, integrated is used for desktop and everything else. Its a kind of crossfire.

this might help:

There are two modes in Catalyst Control Center: 'Power saving' and 'High Performance'. If 'Power saving' is selected for an application, then it uses Intel graphics card. If 'High Performance' is selected for an application, it automatically uses the AMD Radeon graphics card. You can configure it according to your preference. It is advisable that you choose 'High Performance' for application which uses more memory like games etc.

its advice from dell but it still fits: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19474269

https://support.serato.com/hc/en-us/articles/202305784-Changing-graphics-card-settings-to-use-your-dedicated-GPU-on-a-Windows-computer-
 

tomlep

Commendable
Jul 7, 2016
2
0
1,510


I'm afraid that doesn't do it for me. I am familiar with the switchable graphics system. I enabled the better performance option for a few games and Heaven Benchmark, which I used to determine the performance.

One of the games I tried is Trackday Manager, downloaded from Steam. Requirements look like this:

Pentium 4 1.8GHz / Athlon XP 1700+
GeForce 210 / Radeon X600 Series
Windows XP 32-bit
DirectX 9
1 GB of RAM
500 MB HDD Space

I was struggling to get over 10 fps, even on minimum graphics.

Even if R7 would have been enabled, it simply cannot perform this poorly on this setup.
 

Nosferatu_1

Prominent
Jun 5, 2017
1
0
510


hello , iam having the same problem iam just wondering did u solve it ?