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I just bought a Vostro 3550 for my sister a few weeks back and she is a fairly avid gamer. I specifically went for the Vostro 3550 for the fact that it is made better than the Inspiron series and has a nice graphics card, along with Sandy Bridge CPUs. One game she plays is Brink, which requires OpenGL 3.1. With the switchable graphics that Dell has implemented in the 3550, the Intel part of the driver is older than the April 29, 2011 driver update that Intel put out which supports OpenGL 3.1. Why does the Intel driver need to support OpenGL 3.1? Because the card that Brink detects is the Intel. Since the 6xxx series AMD cards use PowerPlay, it only switches to the discrete card based on a program list. My 5xxx series card in my laptop (non-Dell) doesn't have the app-based switching. It's either in High Performance or Longer Battery mode. So the long and the short of it is that Dell needs to update the drivers for the Vostro 3550 that include newer Intel driver components along with the AMD drivers. These types of things are OEM custom so using an AMD driver won't work. Installing the Intel and AMD separately disables the AMD card completely. So Dell, please update this. The switchable graphics works for some applications and not for others. 




Status Update:  Please see bill_b's comments here, here and here about the updates for effected systems.  Thanks for posting!

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