I can not understand AMD Radeon graphics card working or not?

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tevekke

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Jan 23, 2014
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hello,

i have bought a dell inspiron i5 laptop (8 gb ddr) with both intel on-board card amd radeon 8730 graphics card. my os is win 7-32 bit.

question is: is it normal that my games (for instance sims3) have a very bad performance although they are not new games and set with the lowest display settings? whwn i open games they have lags, graphics are not smooth, sims3 freezes and crashes when i play for a while.

i uninstalled the driver of amd radeon and played the games without it: nothing changed! the graphics were same. so, does this mean, the games does not use my amd radeon card, but the intel onboard low-performance card?

im trying to find a way to solve it but i do not even know whether my amd radeon works or not. how can i know it? i installed the driver and catalyst sofware succesfully, everything seems ok but my performance is terrible (besides, dxdiag only shows the intel on-board card, not amd. morever, when i right click the system tray icon of catalsyt control center, i can only see intel card for switchable graphics). i even started to think that maybe this laptop is not suitable for gaming, so using amd radeon or onboard card does not make any difference? is this possible?

i really need help and recommendations. waiting for your replies. thanks!
 
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Murissokah

Murissokah

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Aug 12, 2007
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Well let's go one thing at a time. First ensure your AMD graphics card is properly installed. Check your device manager, it should show under display adapters with a name like AMD 8730m.


Second, make sure its being used. Once you verify that the driver is properly installed (step one), install GPU-Z and monitor GPU usage on your radeon. There should be a graphical log, so you can run the game for a while than alt+tab to GPU-z and look at the graph to know if its running on the radeon.

Lastly, don't let the branding fool you. Although your processor is an "i5" and your gpu is and AMD "8700" series, their performance will not be anywhere close to desktop parts. That is because mobile parts need to work with a much tighter thermal and power envelope. Notebooks in general aren't suited for gaming, and that is the reason some companies build specific products for that segment and why those products cost a lot more.

Still, this doesn't mean you just can't do it. What it means is that you shouldn't expect to use high image quality settings combined with high resolution.

The Sims 3, while an old game, can be very demanding hardware-wise. It uses a lot of memory and reads an absurd amount of data from disk, which may be your bottleneck right there. Notebooks usually ship with average performing disks at best, and when you need to read lots of small chunks of data those HDDs will hold you back big time, usually causing long hiccups. Run resource monitor and check if that is your case.
 
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