The issue apparently was that the laptop came with no drivers for the AMD card even installed. I've heard that if you get drivers from the manufacturer, you run the risk of the Switchable Graphics option not working at all (at least with NVIDIA cards).
What I did was, I went to the DELL support site, browsed to drivers and downloads for the Alienware M17X R4, and instead of looking at BIOS updates, I looked down at the Video updates. Right there, below the updates for the integrated graphics, was a driver download for the AMD card. I downloaded this, ran it, rebooted, and voila! Device Manager recognizes the card, the Switchable Graphics option is now available when I right click on the Desktop, and after setting an application to run in high performance (a game, for instance), it starts using the card whenever you use that application and stops when you're not. Pretty nifty.
For the sake of completeness, in case anybody else finds this topic, I still see "ATI GFX" in my BIOS for Discrete Graphics, and I still have no graphics or video options in my BIOS Advanced tab. Thankfully, after installing the drivers from the Dell website, I didn't have to fiddle with BIOS at all. Just had to enable the program in the Switchable Graphics menu.
Lapys
3 Posts
0
May 26th, 2013 23:00
Update: I upgraded to BIOS version A11, the newest available. Still no change. The card is not viewable from Device Manager.
Lapys
3 Posts
0
May 27th, 2013 09:00
I fixed the problem.
The issue apparently was that the laptop came with no drivers for the AMD card even installed. I've heard that if you get drivers from the manufacturer, you run the risk of the Switchable Graphics option not working at all (at least with NVIDIA cards).
What I did was, I went to the DELL support site, browsed to drivers and downloads for the Alienware M17X R4, and instead of looking at BIOS updates, I looked down at the Video updates. Right there, below the updates for the integrated graphics, was a driver download for the AMD card. I downloaded this, ran it, rebooted, and voila! Device Manager recognizes the card, the Switchable Graphics option is now available when I right click on the Desktop, and after setting an application to run in high performance (a game, for instance), it starts using the card whenever you use that application and stops when you're not. Pretty nifty.
For the sake of completeness, in case anybody else finds this topic, I still see "ATI GFX" in my BIOS for Discrete Graphics, and I still have no graphics or video options in my BIOS Advanced tab. Thankfully, after installing the drivers from the Dell website, I didn't have to fiddle with BIOS at all. Just had to enable the program in the Switchable Graphics menu.