The game won't let me use my dedicated graphics card

[Banterrific8]

I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 15R SE, which came with an AMD Radeon 7730M dedicated graphics card.

I've set the game to run on "High Performance" with Catalyst Control Center (i.e. to use the dedicated graphics card), but in the in-game settings I'm only able to choose and use the integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000.

This is pretty annoying to be honest as I didn't pay £500+ for the laptop and then £20 for the game to play at 40fps on the lowest settings!

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

P.S. all of the drivers on my laptop are definitely up to date!

[Raist]

If you are getting 40FPS on a laptop, I'm pretty sure you aren't running on the Intel graphics and the game is just mis-reporting it in the config screen. That's what I get on my laptop, and it doesn't have Intel available, only the nVidia (they've disabled it somehow via pinout or BIOS option, not sure). There were some posts at other sites where they were only getting in the ballpark of 20 FPS on their Intel graphics (or worse in some cases).

[Banterrific8]

40fps is on the absolute lowest settings though... surely if I were using my dedicated graphics card, I should be able to run the game better than that? I have an i5 Processor and 8GB of RAM...

[necrosis]

I will tell you right now if you have a laptop with dual video (Intel HD <something> on the CPU and ATi or nVidia seperate) the FFXIV system reporting tool thing is always wrong and will always show the Intel as the video.

IIRC when I did twitter posts from my Alienware M11x R2 with the FFXIV benchmark it always said Intel video though it was using the nVidia chip.

Also FYI. Your laptop doing 40FPS sounds normal to me... for the ATi chip. I don't think any Intel HD chip can run FFXIV anywhere close to 40 FPS even on the lowest settings.

[Raist]

40fps is on the absolute lowest settings though... surely if I were using my dedicated graphics card, I should be able to run the game better than that? I have an i5 Processor and 8GB of RAM...

You're on a laptop though... it's not going to be as robust as what you typically see on a PC's design. Laptop hardware is stripped down to reduce both power consumption and heat, so they are going to under perform by comparison. A 7x00 series in a laptop is not going to be on par with the same number designation in a PC. The game's hardware requirements/recommendations are for PC based hardware, so you have to adjust the expectations a bit when it comes to laptops with similar sounding hardware configurations.

look at the specs of the PC's 7730 and compare them to the specs listed in a review of the laptop's 7730m (BIG difference):
http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...on-7730.aspx#2
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Rad...M.72678.0.html

That review puts the 7730m's WEI index around a 6.6 median score. My I7-3630m Quad Core (2.4GHz) laptop with 8GB DDR3 and an nvidia GTX670MX with 3GB DDR5 scores 7.3. This is circa 2012 if I remember right (bought it as a refurb back in September 2013). My E8400 Dual core (4GHz) with 4 GB DDR2 and an ATI 5870 OC with 1 GB DDR5 (with a 5% underclock to stabilize XIV) still scores 7.8 on the same index. That system is a hodge-podge of hardware from 2008 to 2010, and still outperforms this newer laptop in many areas. The difference is one is PC grade and the other is Laptop---one eats up almost 500w while gaming, the other about 175W. Can you guess which one is able to run 60+ FPS?