As the title says, the automatic switch between the iGPU and the dGPU (rx7700s) in my FW16 doesn’t work. When i turn on the laptop it briefly uses the iGPU as it should, then after a few seconds it switches to the dGPU without me doing anything (i noticed beacuse i get the radeon software notification in the corner of the screen). Whatever i do the laptop always uses the dGPU thus consuming a lot more power and making the whole thing hotter.
Bonus annoyance: when the dGPU is active i cannot adjust the screen brightness, the slider becomes grey and i cannot use it.
I tried reinstalling the drivers, checking the settings in the radeon software (which btw i really dislike) and in windows, nothing seems to make a difference. The only thing that “works” is completely disabling the dGPU in device manager, but that’s obviously not a great fix. I read the it could be a background app forcing the switch but i really don’t know what it could be, i didnt install any software lately.
I have the FW16 with the 7840HS and the rx7700s on windows 11
You will lose any settings you have, but it does fix the issue, until whatever is causing the behavior to trigger it again.
When I first ran into this issue I rolled the drivers/AMD suite back and it seemed a bit better but still happens from time to time.
This really feels like a driver/software bug.
@Giacomo_Faifer do you happen to run your 16 with the charger connected all the time? Personally I feel it happens when I have stuff running that might be using the dGPU and swap form plugged in to battery then back to plugged in.
Yesterday I kept digging and casually found out what was causing the switch: apparently the Epic Games launcher anytime it opened it forced the switch to the dGPU. I don’t know specifically which part of the launcher causes it, but having it running in the background is enough. For now I disabled the fire up at start up and made sure that when I close it it’s actually closed. Since I’ve done it the switch happens correctly.
The annoying issue about the brightness remains, but I have some more information. Apparently when the PC switches to the dGPU windows thinks that the screen also gets swapped, so it treats the display as an external cabled display that needs to be adjusted independently (which is something I obviously cannot do). When the switch happens the settings page about the display literally changes as if I swapped it. Still annoying, but at least I worked out the other issue.