Latitude E6540 - Radeon card simply does not work!

Hello,

I bought Latitude 6540 because of the 2GB Radeon card, just to find out that it simply does not work.

I'm not much of a gamer, but there are some specific games I do play sometimes, for example Portal 2 and Serious Sam BFE.

Neither these two games, nor any other game I have tried to date (e.g. Shadow Warrior, Rage) could take advantage of the Radeon card.

I've updated the drivers and Catalyst to the latest version.

I've set Catalyst to "Maximize Performance" both as default (when plugged in AND when on battery), and specifically per game.

Catalyst monitor reports that the games run in "Maximize Performance".

It doesn't help. The games run worse than they did on my 3 year old Lenovo W510 (which came with an NVIDIA card), and they run exactly the same regardless of whether I set Catalyst to "Force-power saving" or to "Maximize Performance".

I looked in the BIOS for an option to disable the on-board card - but there was none. I read in some forums that newer laptops come with the add-on graphics card attached to the on-board card in such a way that the on-board card cannot be disabled at the hardware level.

I must say that I am extremely disappointed and kind of feel cheated. I hope there is a solution for this, otherwise my first Dell will end up being my last Dell...