M6800 Owners' Thread

That's kind of what I was afraid of. It's a shame that the intel doesn't offer the same or similar depth in its control over that sort of stuff. I've got it "good enough" for now through the tweaking that the intel driver does allow, but it's still frustrating to be locked out of features. I guess the extra 3+ hours of battery life are worth it though.

 

Intel will hopefully continue to improve on that front, but now there is not enough demand for them. Most computers have the cheap 60% gamut screens that means the color would never be used and most would not care.

There are other devices that can calibrate the screen externally. I have been looking into those for calibrating every screen, not just computers. If I find a good one for less than $100 it would probably be worth it.

 

The even worse part is that apparently if you do calibrate the screen, every time you play a game or do something else full screen that's not in a window, you lose the calibration. The worst part is when I have my desktop monitor hooked up and am using that and the internal screen, it sets the desktop to be the calibration profile I have set on the laptop, which makes the already hardware calibrated desktop monitor red and gross looking. As far as I can tell, there's no way to fix it either.

 

There should be a setting under displays to allow the choice of profiles when using an external display.
Also when going fullscreen that may activate the AMD card which could override the settings of the Intel Graphics. The same would be true for games.
Not sure about any, but those are my theories.

That is why I was thinking of an external calibrator, which may not be able to reproduce as much improvement, but I believe is less subject to the changes you mention.

 

It's not an issue with the profiles for a given display. I got that part working, and for browsing the web or basically anything but games that I've tried, it's fine. However, when you fire up a game, the desktop monitor gets the same icc calibration profile applied to it as the monitor on the laptop has applied to it, regardless of what the setting is actually set to. I don't think it's a switching issue, as it's not set via intel or amd, but in windows color manager, and in rendering apps and stuff that use the dedicated card, it's still fine. If I could get it to just set all the displays to the non-calibrated profile (windows default profile) instead of the calibrated one when a game launches, that'd be fine. But I can't even manage that.

 

Hi,

I have recently bought a M6800 with an AMD FirePro M6100 GPU. How do I check the performance of the FirePro to see that it is properly operating?

Thanks

 

You can run an artificial benchmark, 3dmark06 is free, and compare the results to equivalent systems. The AMD m6100 should get somewhere between 20,000 to 23,000.
Or just try gaming with it and see what the FPS you are getting and how the performance is.
Or use 3d software and check the performance the same way.

 

3dmark has a demo version in steam that is free to download. I get about 3300 on it (only the final firestrike benchmark really matters), which is about in line with a 770m, and just slightly below a 7970m.

 

So then the way out - before gaming - would be this:
1. Switch from desktop to notebook display (easy if you have a docking station)
2. Apply desktop profile to notebook display (I always keep a shortcut to advanced color management on my taskbar for easy access)
3. Switch back to desktop monitor
4. Fire up game

Admittedly, this is a bit of a hassle. That's why I don't use icc profiles on my 8770w DC2 / Dell 2209W combo. Both displays come factory calibrated, and while this calibration is not the best (Spyder4 clearly improves on it), it's quite adequate and the lack of custom icc's to mess with is a relief.

With the M6700 / 2209W, however, this is unworkable on the notebook side (the pretty good LG TN FHD screen comes in a shade of blue unknown to nature), so I have to manage icc's manually.

 

And then, of course, there's the 3DMark11, also free, as well as more modern than the 06 version and more customizable than the 2013 version (you don't have to run the whole demo). On the Performance mode you should get a score above 5000.

Also, check the Unigine demos (Benchmarks | Unigine: real-time 3D engine (game, simulation, visualization and VR)). They should run fluently (e.g., the bird's-eye-view opening of the Tropics demo, before the first island, should hover around 100fps) - you should be able to tell.