RDD,
I have noticed that if the charger is plugged in when I play Minecraft, the battery will sometimes discharge. The few times this happened, the machine became very hot near the Magsafe connector. It concerns me, because I can not imagine the hardware is designed to discharge the battery while it is connected to power.
I don't think the AMD GPU would cause more battery drain than the Intel GPU. My reasoning is that the Intel GPU is not designed with gaming in mind. The features it lacks must be provided by software libraries which run on the CPU. The CPU is not optimized for graphics rendering calculations, and can not perform the work as efficiently as a hardware device designed specifically for that purpose.
Thanks for the input.
As a general update, I have achieved 1 hour 30 minutes of playtime on a fully charged battery. The heat seems to be somewhat reduced. It is difficult to judge whether this very small improvement is due to disabling automatic graphics switching. I'd be much happier if I could get two hours of play, and the computer would run less hot while playing.
Thanks everyone for reading and making suggestions to this point. I will update when things get better or worse.
