Radeon 8500M HD problems (laptop)

[Brynn]

Hi guys,

A couple of days ago I posted a question about adjusting screen brightness in this thread.

By changing the power plan, I was able to adjust the screen brightness again, however unfortunately that wasn't the end of the story.

The screen sometimes dims or lights up randomly, regardless of power plan or battery life. It happens even when I'm on 100% or near. Twice I got an error message that Catalyst whatever stopped working, and another time the Intel HD4000 control app appeared on the system tray, so I'm thinking maybe it's just that the two GPUs clash somehow.

Is there a way to set up an order of priority between them? Would that make sense? I mean, can I tell Windows (8.1) that regardless of power plan etc, I want the dedicated GPU to control my screen settings? The same thing happened on Win8, I only upgraded to 8.1 yesterday.

I checked the drivers, the latest is installed of everything. The laptop is a Samsung ATIV book 7, and the GPU is Radeon 8500M HD, as the title has it.

Thanks in advance for any insight!

EDIT:
Additional info: I ran into this problem again, and when I went to the Control Panel to change the power plan settings the following error message appeared:

Catalyst Control Center: Host application has stopped working
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

 

[Brynn]

I found a solution, I'll share it here just in case someone else is looking up the same issue.

Apparently CCC crashing (par for the course for AMD drivers...) is a different problem.

The brightness controls not working had to do with Intel's driver for the 4000HD integrated GPU. They released a fix for it, so anyone in the same shoes should just update the driver to 10.18.10.3304, which works correctly. FINALLY.