HiGame

When it comes to gaming, laptop owners have always been stuck between a rock and a hard place. Thin and light systems often portability and convenience, but limited gaming performance. Larger, desktop-replacement systems offer more than enough firepower for gaming, but are typically heavy and fall into the category of “transportable” rather than portable. The handful of external chassis that have been built by various vendors tend to have their own limitations and often require a reboot when changing the graphics mode, or don’t support laptop hibernation. They’re also typically tied to either a specific product family or even a single product SKU.



AMD wants to offer mobile gamers a more flexible option, and it’s partnered with Razer and Intel to make it possible. XConnect is the name of AMD’s driver support and implementation using Thunderbolt external graphics.

AMD XConnect: External graphics done right?

Since we’re talking about the efforts of three different companies, let me break out which manufacturer contributes what.



AMD wrote drivers for its own Radeon GPUs in order to support an external graphics chassis. Radeon cards running Radeon Software 16.2.2 or later are capable of plug-and-play configuration with an external chassis. The new software can monitor which applications are running on an external GPU and offers the option to close current applications and prep the system for safe removal. Unlike previous solutions, you can connect or disconnect an external dock without rebooting the system.




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