I feel this nugget of information requires its own thread. From the 4.01 BIOS beta thread:
Added support for the NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5070.
Integrated the NVIDIA DR and VK keys to support the NVIDIA G-SYNC feature (requires a 2nd Gen Display k=Kit).
Added support for the NVIDIA Advanced Optimus feature (requires a 2nd Gen Display Kit).
We were informed of the need for the 2nd gen display for G-Sync during the announcement, but this implies that for Nvidia Optimus to select the iGPU or dGPU appropriately you need the 2nd gen display. Could someone from Framework please chime in and confirm or correct this as needed.
NVIDIA Advanced Optimus is a utility that only works with NVIDIA GPUs. Advanced Optimus enables NVIDIA GPUs to cut out the iGPU and just directly drive the display. Without a G-Sync display, it seems like Advanced Optimus should still let the NVIDIA GPU drive the monitor and sync the refresh rate using FreeSync.
I wonder what I’m missing or mistaken about? It might be that the information @Quin_Chou provided in the 4.01 BIOS beta thread was incorrect about that part. Maybe it was supposed to say “requires NVIDIA GPU” instead…?
Advanced optimus is the newer nvidia mux feature that was suppose to fully fix the lag that older optimus caused, where the igpu had some involvement in driving the display even when the dgpu was in use.
I take the post in the bios to mean without the gen 2 display, advanced optimus won’t be available and we’re falling back to the normal optimus implementation.
You can try ‘normal optimus’ by just turning off AMD smart access graphics in the Radeon software. I keep it off normally because I run a few games/windows in different resolutions than the native display and it tends to cause the screen to resize/rescale weirdly when I revert to desktop or try to alt tab.
Unless you’ve used a laptop with a MUX switch or working advanced optimus setup from recent release cycles, this is what pretty much all laptops with dedicated GPUs have felt like. The original release of advanced optimus was a bit of a flop, most reviewers said it didn’t work well and had similar issues as with my resolution scaling problem.
You’ll need to define ‘good experience’ for yourself however, if you’re used to a direct dGPU connection it might feel off. That said, if all you’ve ever used were laptops which you didn’t have to go into BIOS to swap between dgpu or igpu, you probably won’t notice any issues.
They have game benchmarks with the old unit and the 5070 attached. Unless they only did a main board swap, I assume they did a swap in of the 7700s, since it’s easier than a full disassembly for the board swap, implying the 2023 + 5070 numbers are run on an old screen as well.
But again, the issue you’re demanding evidence for isn’t easy to document in raw fps. If you’ve tried switching an older laptop with a bios mux from optimus to dgpu only, that’s the easiest way to understand. Honestly, I’d compare an optimus vs full MUX (or advanced optimus) to how it feels between a low response time display and a higher. The same FPS on both can feel slightly better on the direct gpu connection, but if it’s not something you’ve been accustomed to, you won’t necessarily notice.
Will we have to switch in the BIOS each time? Damn.
My concern was battery life… I don’t mind a few extra ms of latency or some FPS loss, my main concern was: can the 1st gen mainboard fully shut off the 5070 when not in use and start it up when running heavy loads? I always keep the dGPU attached even on the go, so i’d like to keep my 6-8hrs of runtime even with the new Nvidia.
I’m more afraid if the old Optimus mux that never knew what GPU to use. I had a Lenovo for years that I had to manually select which GPU to use in Windows settings.
No, there’s a difference between normal optimus and advanced optimus. Normal optimus does not require the new screen, the new screen is needed for gsync and advanced optimus, which is the self-operating mux.
The FM16 doesn’t have a BIOS switch for optimus or dGPU only I think? We would probably be running normal optimus only with the old screen. I recommend checking out Jarred’s Tech’s video series on optimus, advanced optimus, and finally CASO: List of Gaming Laptops with MUX Switch & Advanced Optimus - Jarrod's Tech
Ever since CASO was released, the difference between optimus and direct dGPU has been pretty small for most modern games. I think it’s a major reason why the 2023 + 5070 ended up basically directly equal to the 2025 + 5070 numbers in ArsTechnica’s tests. Before CASO, there would have been a small impact from the optimus delay. I run my 16 right now without Smart Access graphics enabled, because I keep my desktop and games at a lower resolution than the native screen. SA enabled keeps messing with the display resolution when it toggles the iGPU on/off for the MUX. I have not noticed any real drawback from using the standard windows optimus fallback.
Optimus not knowing what GPU to use wasn’t so much an optimus issue as a windows one… In the olden days, it was pretty easy to tell games to use the nvidia card directly in Nvidia’s driver settings. As windows grabbed more and more controls to stuff in the stupid new windows 11 settings, you now have to dig through several layers of windows crapware to find the completely unintuitive per-app graphics settings page…
So basically the old mainboard+5070 would work exactly as it used to with the 7700S? Windows selecting apps and a small hiccup during dGPU activation and deactivation?
Regardless of what optimus version is used, Windows will always select the gpu per app. Only if you’re on an old BIOS selected MUX set to dGPU only will that not occur. My assumption is that putting a 5070 into an original gen FM16 will result in only standard windows-driven optimus being enabled, since you won’t have the option for advanced optimus.
Unless you really like AMD’s smartaccess graphics (AMD equivalent of Advanced Optimus) you can just try toggling that off in the AMD driver menu to see what normal optimus would be like (assuming you have a 16 with 7700s at the moment).