ATI Support For PowerPlay on MacBook Pro

[glisse]

To revisit this old subject - recently I installed gutsy and 8.42.3 driver ... and I find that powerplay is still not enabled by ATI so we still depend on this fix by Anszom (thanks again).... anyway enabling the power low option reduces power by ~ 9W... 32W down to 23 W...

glxgears runs at 2600 FPS at low power and 4900 FPS at full power

Question - is there anyway to encourage ATI to enable powerplay - this would obviously a boon for all laptop users...

Question 2 ... is there a preferred way to run the Anszom fix (needs to be root) at startup (I guess that it needs to be run after starting fglrx?)

1. I am prety sure that amd rely on bios for powerplay so if your bios haven't powerplay then you screw (talk to your laptop manufacturer)

2. You likely need to run it while fglrx is running as fglrx might overwritte some of its setting.

[crumpet]

Dear Glisse

Like you - I have an Apple macbook pro C2D... and I have no idea how to get Apple to fix the Bios - however why do ATI rely on bios - when this reliance is not essential - is there any chance that an open-source driver will have power level options built in?

I added the command to what is called /etc/rc.local in Ubuntu.... and I/we are lucky ... the low power settings are still valid on user login

ciao cw

[glisse]

Dear Glisse

Like you - I have an Apple macbook pro C2D... and I have no idea how to get Apple to fix the Bios - however why do ATI rely on bios - when this reliance is not essential - is there any chance that an open-source driver will have power level options built in?

I added the command to what is called /etc/rc.local in Ubuntu.... and I/we are lucky ... the low power settings are still valid on user login

ciao cw

I can't comment on AMD plan i don't know them, but we will add powersaving things, we will even add dynamic reprogramming and things like automaticly changing powerconsumption according to profile you define (for instance if you are on batery). But power is at the bottom of the todo list (at least for me).

[karmapolis]

X1300 runs hotter on Linux than in Windoze

I experience a similar problem with a Palit/ATI X1300 PRO 256MB card on a desktop PC. Although ATI's driver (version 8.433) does detect powerplay on this card, only one powerplay state is detected ("default state", 601/396 MHz). I wonder if it would be possible to add other power saving states, and how.

Anyway, at that same powerplay state, ATI's driver Windows XP normally drives the card at about 48 degrees Celsius, but ATI's Linux driver makes the card run at 56 degrees Celsius (both running 2D only, idle and under equal weather conditions). So there must be something that the Linux driver is doing wrong.

I tried the radeontool utility, both anszom's and vrodic's versions, but my Linux kernel crashes immediately (not syncing). I guess that utility was made for X1600 and not for X1300. Since AMD hasn't released the X1300 Registers Guide, I couldn't compare it to the X1600 to see what radeontool should be doing for X1300.

Is there anybody who can help us X1300 users out? Thanks!


K.

Over at the mactel development list we're hoping with every new release that ATI will fix a stupid and presumably minute bug that makes, at least for me, then new revision Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros essentially unusable under linux. This laptop unfortunately has an ATI radeon mobility X1600 card and, while the older version of the notebook (with the core duo processor) had exactly the same card and had support for power states, for some reason in the new revision ATI's buggy driver thinks the card does not support powerstates. This means that the card is always burning maximum power which makes the new revision run much hotter than its almost identilcal core duo predecessor. [...]
Has anyone seen this kind of problem on other core 2 duo laptops?

http://www.g2inf.one.pl/~anszom/MBP-ATI/

This is an experimental patched version of radeontool with a 'power' command which allows me to reduce the power usage on a MacBook Pro (core2duo edition) by ~8 watts.

[puntarenas]

This is really irritating. I hope I am not going OT, but does that mean the new RV670 cards with "PowerPlay" will also depend on driver support for their power saving modes?

I had a X1900XT until now and by default it was working at the 2D clocks/voltages as set up within the cards BIOS no matter what driver I used.

[axet]

bug still persist, 2 years old, thanks for ATI!!