TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

Hello all.
Can anyone confirm that enabling TwinView in xorg.conf prevents the driver of entering lower power consumption mode?

I have a Thinkpad T61p with the "Quadro FX 570M" GPU running the latest Ubuntu (8.04-AMD64) with the 169.12 drivers.
I can understand the higher power requirements when using an external monitor, but even if no external monitor is connected and Twinview is enabled PowerMizer always reports:

Performance Level: 2
NV Clock: 475MHz
MemoryClock: 702MHz


If I comment out the TwinView bits (without changing default value for DynamicTwinView) from xorg.conf, the nvidia-settings reports that the Performance Level is 0 when not using an external monitor.
The problem with this solution is that if I connect and external monitor after X starts and use the nvidia-settings utility to enable it, the Ubuntu window manager sees both screens as single big screen, and the result is that windows maximize across both screens.

Without editing xorg.conf all the time, I'm not able to enjoy dual screen bliss while on my desk, and long battery life when on the move, while this is not critical it sure is annoying.


Thinks I've tried:
-Playing around with 'Option "NoTwinViewXineramaInfo"' -> has no effect
-Playing around with MetaModes -> has no effect

Is there any workaround?

--
Luis Neves

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

by default it's:
- metacity w/o special effects
- compiz w/ special effects

they're different and may have different (hidden?) configurable options WRT your issue.

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

You are right, I should have mentioned that.
I'm using "compiz w/ special effects"

Thanks!

--
Luis Neves

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

Yes i can confirm this behaviour with a dell d830 and a nvs140

Using twinview seems to force powerlevel on 2

very annoying for noise issues.

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

my guess would be the card can't deal with such large textures and effects without bumping up the Hz.

I don't get it though, Luis, you're using twinview, not dynamic? thus I guess X (and the card) is always configured to output something on external? certainly that's why there's no difference between plugged external and not.

only guesswork tho.

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

I can confirm this on a 8600M GS 512 MB w/ 180.27.
Twinview forces PowerLevel 2, which is rather bad for heat and noise.

Can someone from nvidia confirm whether this is a technical neccessity or a bug?

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

Now that I got sick of my laptop being super noisy because of my gpu running at perf lvl 3, I tried the following in my xorg.conf:

et voilà - Performance lvl 1 (lowest), even though TwinView is activated and I'm driving two 1680x1050 displays (one via HDMI).

So in the end, this is just another bug in PowerMizer - it just won't reduce clock speed while a secondary display is in use.

This is my last caveat with the nvidia driver, other than that, it pretty much does everything that I want. Except being published under GPL. Ah well ;)

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

I noticed this too, I'm stuck at highest clock speeds with twinview too.

xserver 1.4, 8400m gs: 180.29

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

I'm using twinview and I am still locked on level 0. The performance is absolutely terrible, the system can barely even handle a web browser. Latitude D830, nvs 140m, 180.29. 180.25 at least locked me at level 1 which was kind of usable without desktop effects, but level 0 is not.

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

I search a answer for this question too...

is there a way to correct this? automatic or manually...

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

180 series works for me ... so also this other thread:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...01&postcount=7

Re: TwinView disables PowerMizer?
 

This is not a bug: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...96#post2027196