Should my laptop be running this slowly?

This is one of my first forum posts so forgive me for bad etiquette.

I have a 2nd gen i7 processor and a Radeon HD 6490M GPU but most games are too slow to be playable. I would imagine my hardware should be decent enough, am I wrong?
My graphics card is not showing up in the adapter drop-down box--only the intel graphics family... could that be causing the bad performance?

Any info is appreciated.
John