I must have hit the wrong setting somewhere when I started tuning rift the first time. When returning ccc (vision control center) to balanced mode and putting rift on default settings for each tier of graphic quality I began to see quite decent performance overall from the satellite p775d with a8 APU. So good in fact that this is a 100 percent turnaround of a post. While not close to my main rig it is decent enough to walk around in the capital city of Meridian without a lot of drag. Outside in the game world there was a much more notable improvement.
A number of points to consider. For one, we must simply assume that the apu is set up by driver tuning for defaults since my previous changes I made were to reduce computational stresses. It is an assumption because I have been known to reduce framerates when fooling around with ccc without entirely understanding the reason. I also can conjecture that the apu has to balance processing power with graphics output and thus I may have accidentally bunged up the works by trying to run too much data through.
Either way I’m glad I rechecked my settings. Rift plays very well on defaults with both vision control center and the various graphics settings in Rift. One thing to note, turning shadows down in the settings greatly improved frame rates, saying that while the game world is fully rendered, you still need a dedicated gpu if you want all the bells and whistles. However, you need to buy a 1300 dollar laptop to achieve the same effect I have been able to get on a 700 dollar laptop. Amd vs. Intel, game set and match AMD. Now if only they would raise the clock speeds :-d