I have an HP Envy 15 laptop as a portable machine for light gaming. My processor is an AMD A10-5750M and, when my laptop is plugged in, stays around 3.2-3.5ghz in all 4 cores. My laptop also has a built-in AMD Radeon HD 8750M discrete graphics card. However, I am not sure if it is really being used or not. When I turn off dual graphics in Catalyst Control Center (which supposedly makes everything APU-only), I don't really get a downgrade in performance. Also, my primary display adapter is AMD Raedon 8650G + 8600/8700M Dual Graphics, which seems to be primarily going through the APU as various programs say that I only have around 800MB video memory. Catalyst Control Center recognizes the display adapter mentioned above as my primary display adapter, with my 8750M being listed as my linked adapter.
How can I be absolutely sure that my GPU is being used? What can I do to simply disable my APU and make it so that my GPU does all of the work? I should be getting higher framerates in games by turning dual graphics on, thus enabling the GPU, but that does not happen. The only time I can downgrade my performance is by unplugging my computer, which disables turbo-core and limits my processor to 2.5ghz per core max.
Normally, I would just access the BIOS and disable my APU's VRAM or, if this was a desktop, plug my monitor directly into my GPU. However, my BIOS is OEM-limited and only has basic options.
GPU-z will show you gpu usage. Just go to the sensors tab - click on the boxes to go min/avg/max, run game or benchmark, come back and check gpu usage.
They are both being used. I ended up going into Catalyst Control and sliding all of the sliders to "performance" instead of "quality" which didn't seem to reduce quality at all but my framerates are pretty much perfect now. I still get worse framerates in some games though (compared to my brother's similarly-spec'd computer), but that's probably down to the GPU clock rate and 500mhz per core weaker processor.