m15 R5, brightness locked when Advanced Optimus is Enabled

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Do you mean the BIOS- Advance- Enable Hybrid Graphics? If yes, wasn't it set to Enabled out of the box? If yes and Enabled, was the brightness locked out of the box?

Yes, that's it.

Screen brightness worked fine out of the box with Advanced Optimus enabled. I am not aware when this problem first occurred because I usually use the system with Advanced Optimus disabled (turning it off improves performance, but is bad for battery life).

I also had this problem and this was the solution for me as well. Is this something that should be ideally 'Enabled' eventually? Unclear on if this is an issue that will be addressed.

The amount of research and people I've spoken to whochad no idea! I wonder why it changed from disabled to enaled though! Anywho it works as per normal now many thanks champ!!

I'm having the same issue with the brightness and also have tried the many methods to resolve such an issue as other users have posted on this thread. Today I will try to disable the Advanced Optimus (Disable the Hybrid Graphics) in the bios and will post again if it does not work. 

I hope to revisit this thread to hear of other users solutions and/or if there are driver updates that resolve this entirely. 

I am wondering how does disabling the "Advanced Optimus/Hybrid Graphics" effect the performance overall? Should this ever be enabled again in the future?

My last question that may or may not be related, has anyone noticed their battery life/efficiency has also dramatically worsened? I am well aware of the many ways to preserve a laptop's battery and have certainly taken good care of this device. In the last month or two the battery life dropped from holding an average 2-3 hour charge (more if left asleep), down to about 30-40 minutes (and actually gets worse when I close the laptop and I can't for the life of me figure out why)... 

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I am wondering how does disabling the "Advanced Optimus/Hybrid Graphics" effect the performance overall? Should this ever be enabled again in the future?

 

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Disabling "Advanced Optimus/Hybrid Graphics" should give you improved performance. You will notice a good boost in FPS for any of your GPU bound games. However it is terrible for battery life, as all of your graphics in your system will be computed by the power hungry dedicated GPU.

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My last question that may or may not be related, has anyone noticed their battery life/efficiency has also dramatically worsened?

 

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This was the problem I have had as well. Here's how I've improved battery life:

• Enabled "Advanced Optimus"
• Turned off LEDs (for keyboard and back of laptop)
• Downloaded "Ryzen Controller" (I have a Ryzen Laptop) and capped temps at 70C
• Reconfigured fan curves in AWCC to run low
• Turned on "Low Power Mode"

You can also check the health of your battery using windows. Here's an article detailing how you can get windows to give you a Battery Health Report:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/caring-for-your-battery-in-windows-2db3e37f-5e7d-488e-9086-ed15320519e4

problem ist NVIDIA graphics Card driver. Use last driver from Dell Support, it will work fine, also with optimus. Using driver from NVIDIA it will cancel working your brightness controll.

So decide to use OLD driver supported from DELL and getting back 100%functionality, or use NVIDIA driver from NVIDIA and get lost of brightness control, but you are able to play games with newer driver.

Same Problem with m15 R5, R6, please provide newer driver from DELL for NVIDIA. Problem is that we are used to use newest driver for gaming like BF2042. Game does not support 512.72 driver provided from Dell (to old) but with newer driver provided from NVIDIA - brightness control get lost ! So we need newer driver from manufactor.

Now the driver that had working brightness controls with Optimus is gone from support.

The new driver that was released on 10 Apr 2023 that is on support breaks brightness too, seems like its just a wrapped installer of an older nvidia geforce experience driver that breaks brightness rather than a custom driver that fixes the issue. Is anyone else having the same issue?

Yes I can confirm behaviour described. Is there no quality assurance who is testing the driver released from manufacture ? 

It's enabled by default to preserve battery life. That's not the issue really, the issue is some driver is messing with windows, not letting the device brightness be changed.

Still looking for a fix for this. Just bought this thing used, M15 R5. I thought maybe because it was wiped that was the issue. Installed all the Nvidia and Dell drivers and nothing works. Reset multiple times. Only thing that fixes it is disabling the optimus thing in the bios.

If anybody was still having an issue with this the only fix without disabling optimus is to get the legacy drivers, there is button for "Older Versions" on the alienware support site

any driver that is from 25 Aug 2022 and earlier should fix brightness, but may not be able to use some applications that require the latest drivers (which a lot of games and multimedia applications do)

and before you ask, Yes you paid 1k+ for a laptop and have to choose between brightness control or hardware compatibility

Ridiculous that this has not been fixed. Won't be going with Alienware again.

The most desperate thing is that no one from Dell responds to these claims, come on, not only 10 people bought this computer. I will never buy an Alienware-Dell computer again in my life.