I'm no expert in the area, but it seems to me that when you start that kind of app it should be a no-brainer for your laptop's power-saving features to recognize that it shouldn't power-throttle the GPU.
You said that BF3 works, and to me that makes perfect sense with the power-saving hypothesis. Have you checked that your laptop isn't using power saving features? Click to expand.Why on earth do you not want your hardware to use its full power? You can't have it both ways - full performance without full utilization.
