Radeon open source drivers for 7970m?
 

I'm running Arch Linux on my new laptop, which has the switchable graphics, between the Ivy Bridge Intel graphics and an AMD 7970M. Intel drivers work flawlessly (as expected) and I can get fglrx to work acceptably. However, fglrx doesn't seem to play nice with dual monitors -- it produces a jiteryness (for lack of a better term) on my laptop monitor and an external display, when I use xrandr to extend the desktop to the external monitor. (Cloning displays works fine.)

That said, I'm trying to get the opensource radeon drivers to work with this chipset in the hopes of getting reasonable dual monitor support, and I had recently found out that they are not compatible with this chipset yet. However, I noticed on Phoronix that the 7.1.0 version of the driver includes support for 7xxx series AMD GPUs.

Has anyone had any luck running the opensource drivers on the 7970M, or am I stuck using fglrx if I want to use the discreet card?

The open source drivers work with my 7560D, VERY slowly. I use the 3.7 kernel from experimental and the mesa libs from testing and the 6.14.4 drivers. I did only a short test as a proof of concept and it isnt nice. fglrx works perfectly on xfce with 1 monitor (didnt try with 2 yet).
What DE do you use? If it has compositing eabled, try disabling it.

In your case, even if they work, you will have to say goodbye to anything power management related = card always on full speed, bad performance. In theory you can modify the power management profile manually.