ATI Support For PowerPlay on MacBook Pro

[glussier]

Do no other machines plan to use EFI

Yes, Microsoft was supposed to support EFI with the release of Vista. However, for some reason, probably time constraints, Microsoft has pushed back EFI support for 1 to 2 years.

I just found a good link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1937900,00.asp

[dpope]

I'll try to work out some more information on PowerPlay for the new MacBook Pros.

Hi Michael,

Any update from AMD? If the issue really is in the BIOS then it would be useful to know if its something that can be circumvented by the driver or if the BIOS itself has to be fixed. If its the latter (which I hope not) then it would be good to know the specific bios feature missing so that we can try to get Apple to fix it (though I'm really not optimistic about this scenario).

thanks,
Sheer

[Michael]

Hi Michael,

Any update from AMD? If the issue really is in the BIOS then it would be useful to know if its something that can be circumvented by the driver or if the BIOS itself has to be fixed. If its the latter (which I hope not) then it would be good to know the specific bios feature missing so that we can try to get Apple to fix it (though I'm really not optimistic about this scenario).

thanks,
Sheer

The feature cannot be circumvented and is dependent upon the PowerPlay support in the video BIOS. I think that's about all the information there is...

[crumpet]

Is that the end of the story - or is there some hope that powerplay can be made to operate with x1600 card in the C2D macbook pros?

[crumpet]

Another thought ... have you tried bootcamp 1.3... maybe the difference between mcbook pro C2D and CD was a different version of bootcamp. I have been using bootcamp 1.2 - and powerplay does not work

UPDATE bootcamp 1.3 also does not work

[dpope]

Another thought ... have you tried bootcamp 1.3... maybe the difference between mcbook pro C2D and CD was a different version of bootcamp. I have been using bootcamp 1.2 - and powerplay does not work

UPDATE bootcamp 1.3 also does not work

Thanks for the update. I hope this is not the end of the story but so far things don't look so great. At the mactel-linux-users list we tried to set the GPU clock speeds in windows and see if they would hold after a reboot but it does not:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=4b0472fc0706091625r4624527fra3fab0a518315feb%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=mactel-linux-users

Moreover, we wanted to see if the issue is really a BIOS issue or a buggy driver issue. It is definitely possible to change the clock speeds in Windows using the Omega drivers (that are not written by AMD/ATI but by someone else) so if there is a BIOS issue its specific to the way AMD/ATI implement it in their drivers and there _is_ a workaround. To confirm this we wanted to check whether PowerPlay worked in windows with the ATI driver. Jon Grosshart, who has win XP installed on his MBP C2D, suffered through trying to get the ATI drivers to install on windows which was apparently a pain (see the thread) but he said it doesn't even seem to have a powerplay option so there was no way to check.

The fact that with the Omega drivers it is possible to change the GPU clock speeds indicates that there is a way around whatever issue the AMD developers claim exists with the BIOS. Michael, if you're reading this I would appreciate it if you could point this out to the developers. There should be a way to get this to work in Linux if it does in Windows (with the Omega drivers).

I'm not sure what to do next. I tried contacting the Omega developer (who presumably has an NDA) to ask for his advice but he just said he doesn't work on linux.

Perhaps this is something the Open source driver can fix? I would be happy to run my machine with only 2-d support for now if it ran cooler. Apparently from the post on Phoronix these drivers don't yet support the MacBook Pro (I'm not sure where Michael got this information from since I didn't hear anything about it on the mactel-lists).

Any further ideas are welcome.

[Michael]

Perhaps this is something the Open source driver can fix? I would be happy to run my machine with only 2-d support for now if it ran cooler. Apparently from the post on Phoronix these drivers don't yet support the MacBook Pro (I'm not sure where Michael got this information from since I didn't hear anything about it on the mactel-lists).

I got the information from Jerome (the Avivo main developer). The open-source support will be there, and he has a patch for the support, but first it's being cleaned up before committing it to git.

[crumpet]

I would also be happy with only 2-D support if it meant that it could run silently...

In my opinion the real strange thing is that the macbook pro CD can run POWERPLAY - while the C2D cannot. If I understand correctly from reading various forums - the BIOS is different between these two machines. Is is at all possible to rewrite these BIOS blocks?

We know that the ATI drivers do have the ability to change the clock speed since this is possible with the macbook pro CD... so it would seem that it is really just a very minor bug in the ATI driver just not recognising/interpretating the BIOS version correctly - the problem, as always, is to hope that ATI take the trouble to track down this bug.

I would be happy to test anything to help resolve this problem ... however I do not have WINDOWS installed

[dpope]

I got the information from Jerome (the Avivo main developer). The open-source support will be there, and he has a patch for the support, but first it's being cleaned up before committing it to git.

Its very comforting to hear that the main Avivo developer has a MacBook Pro (or at least has access to one) so we can expect good support for this. Any idea if this patch or these drivers are supposed to support power states? I don't want to bother the developers with this since I'm sure they have a lot of more basic features they want to support first but it would be great if this is supported in the long run. It is supported in the R300 cards via "DynamicClocks" correct? I was under the impression that this option had a similar effect to powerplay.

[Michael]

Its very comforting to hear that the main Avivo developer has a MacBook Pro (or at least has access to one) so we can expect good support for this. Any idea if this patch or these drivers are supposed to support power states? I don't want to bother the developers with this since I'm sure they have a lot of more basic features they want to support first but it would be great if this is supported in the long run. It is supported in the R300 cards via "DynamicClocks" correct? I was under the impression that this option had a similar effect to powerplay.

It's too early for the powerstates support. I haven't asked Jerome about that, but I wouldn't expect to see dynamic clocking support for a few months.