I got the FW16 with the Radeon RX 7700S and I noticed consistent frame rate drops in games, when the laptop is not plugged in. This happens even in older games, and even on a full battery.
If I plug in the power cord mid-game, it will freeze for a fraction of a second and then run much smoother than before. That short freeze seems to indicate that it’s switching profiles, or that it’s switching from integrated to discrete graphics, or something along those lines.
Has anyone else experienced a similar issue, and do you know how to fix it? The behavior I want is that when playing games, performance should not in any way be compromised in favor of battery life, even if I’m not plugged in.
Did a bit of debugging. This is only an issue in an older game (Gothic 2 / Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos, from 2003). When I’m playing something recent (Cyberpunk 2077, from 2022), then SmartAccess switches from the APU to the GPU.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to change the power settings to maintain the same performance plugged in as unplugged. The laptop will automatically drop the power going to the dGPU the moment you unplug it.
The stuttering you are experiencing is likely due to the GPU adjusting to the amount of power it can now receive now that it has access to the 180W charger. The dGPU can pull around 100W so the battery would not be able to supply that much power which is why the stuttering likely occurs.
I don’t have my Framework 16 yet so this is just a hypothesis. Maybe someone else who has their Framework 16 can verify this. AMD’s Smart Access Graphics might not be as well integrated into the older games you’re playing so it has a harder time switching between APU and dGPU which is why the performance drop is more noticeable (This is a hypothesis I cannot confirm if it is 100% accurate).
Having the same amount of performance on battery as on the power adapter likely is not possible, but hopefully this information is useful!
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It’s a good hypothesis and it makes sense.
When it comes to the particular game I’m playing, it’s only able to use the iGPU, even when the laptop is plugged in. Looked up come explanations online, and it seems to be because it’s a DirectX 7 game.
That seems to mean that power is also restricted to the iGPU when the laptop is not plugged in.