W500 Does NOT Support Hardware Flash in Official Flash 10.1!

Alright guys... what are we going to do about this? This is suppose to be a high end powerful notebook and Lenovo does not offer the driver support to have hardware accelerated flash!!!

The W500 currently have 8.64....

 

Can't you juste use the official driver directly from ATI instead of Lenovo?

 

ATI does not offer Professional graphics on their website. They redirect you to your OEM. The alternative is to try their consumer graphics. Unfortunately those do not support hybrid ATI graphics. I tried to install them anyways and it errored out. Regardless a high end workstation laptop should not have to deal with these kinds of problems!

 

I agree with you Lenovo should release a newer version of their ATI driver. This is what makes a notebook a "business" notebook. Especially in the field of graphic drivers ~9 months are way too long. Maybe you could try the official Lenovo forum aswell. For now you can either try a modified/not supportet ATI driver to gain h.264 acceleration (and of course other fixes and optimizations from the last few months) or stay with the original one and keep the switchable functionality. I don't have a ATI GPU so I am not sure if there is a modified driver which supports the switchable GPU.

 

I don't even use the switchable because the integrated options gives worse battery life in Windows 7! I don't mind using a driver that doesn't support switchable, but I cannot lose OpenGL support.

 

Don't consumer drivers support OpenGL aswell? If you have the time you could try it. The W500 has a ATI Radeon HD3650 with some modifications making it a FireGL. So I guess everything should work like it should except that OpenGL performance may be less and DirectX aka gaming performance may increase. I don't know if the ATI mobility modder software supports the newest drivers or FireGL 5700 - but maybe worth a try.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't someone here around when Flash 10.1 went release candidate point out that only the Mobility 4000's/FireGL equivalents and later were going to support hardware (regardless of the state of the display driver)? It annoys me that my W500 apparently is screwed. I'd be interested too about hacking drivers to try to get it. I don't think I'd want to give up switchable graphics though

Paul386, have you tried switching between discrete and integrated each time you turn on your Thinkpad? It's a known glitch that W7 turns on both the Intel and ATI graphics. A glitch Lenovo still hasn't fixed and the reason why I use Vista

 

The HD3650 driver will not install on the W500 because it says that is a switchable graphics system. I have switchable disabled at the BIOS level...

The HD3650 (same physical thing as the V5700 we have) supports Flash 10.1 hardware support with the new Catalyst drivers.

 

Well that's good news! Although maybe not if the switchable is preventing it.

 

I tried installing the catalyst drivers for the w500 and it would constantly crash / blue screen on me when using win7 x64. Wondering if anyone did manage to get it working with the catalyst drivers?

Did anyone try eeking out a response from lenovo?

 

I've gotten catalyst drivers to work before after disabling integrated graphics in the BIOS, then uninstalling all graphics drivers, running mobility modders flash on the ATI catalyst drivers, then installing those modded drivers, then restarting, then it was all good. Or at least that's the gist of it, might have taken me one or two goes at it.

Lost support for wide-screen resolutions in games but was otherwise fine. Also, gaming performance was worse with the modded drivers than with the normal drivers. Surprising.