10. Powerplay In Practice: Not (Yet) Ready For Action

While there's no doubt that ATi's engineers put a lot of effort into the chip's energy saving techniques, these have not been consistently implemented (yet). Although the driver of our review sample offered a slider for choosing between maximum performance and maximum battery life, these settings had no effect on either one.

The Powerplay slider setting has no effect on performance or power consumption.

No matter what setting the slider was set to, the frame rates remained the same and power consumption also remained unaffected. When asked about this, the manufacturer of our notebook informed us that the current driver revision 7.88 does not yet support all of the Powerplay features, but that they would be implemented very soon with a BIOS/ driver update.

Now, imagine that you buy a car and discover that only four of its gears work, but that the economy gear doesn't. Although you're still able to reach top speed in fourth gear, the car is not as economical as it could be. So you call the dealership and your friendly sales representative or service person cheerfully answers "No worries! Your car is running smoothly, reliably and fast, right? We'll give you that fifth gear in a software update during the next big inspection!" I'm sure you'd probably "thank" your sales rep and get one of those customer satisfaction survey forms ASAP.

Also, we found that the graphics driver could not determine when the notebook was connected to a wall socket and when it was running off battery power. At least the Powerplay GUI claimed that the chip was connected to an external power source mode even when it was really using the battery.

It's mysterious that, even when drawing power from the battery, the driver claims the notebook is connected to a wall socket. It also refused to switch to the Optimal Battery Life setting.