PowerMizer and Power Saving and Linux

[Ditig]

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone knows when NVidia plans on adding support for PowerMizer for power saving. This is really needed for laptops with dedicated nvidia GPUs. I had a look at the latest release notes for the 1.0-8776 driver (http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L...DME/readme.txt) but didn't find any mention of it. Any ideas?

PS. Is there anything else that can be done to reduce power if all I need is 2D graphics while using the battery? Thanks.

[NURO305]

We could REALLY use advanced power controls for nVidia cards on L.inux...

Sadly, my new Alienware notebook only get's 1.5 hours on a full battery just doing regular work. I know you can't have a huge graphics card (GeForce Go 7600) and have excellent battery life as well, but any driver with better ability to control the fan and such would be a great investment from NVidia in the future of Lunix.

Additionally, now that Windows has partnered with Novell and SLED on compatibility issues, I'm sure we'll see more and more Linux systems in Corporate America, So come on NVidia........ where's our tool-set for linux ? ;-)

[cellstije]

Originally Posted by Ditig

Hi,
PS. Is there anything else that can be done to reduce power if all I need is 2D graphics while using the battery? Thanks.

try nvclock:

http://www.linuxhardware.org/nvclock/

i use it on my laptop with gforce go 6200TC to underclock the gpu.
The following comand forces the gpu memory at 200hz and its core at 100hz

nvclock -f m 200 -n 100

the default values in my case are 600Hz for the memory and 300Hz for the core.

I believe that the nvidia folks could enable the underclocking on all the mobile gpus supported by their drivers very easily: by allowing the coolbits option for mobile gpus. In order to avoid users to toast their gpus, a sound policy would be to disallow the overclocking on the "go" class, only underclocking.

However a dynamic switching of the core/memory frequency as it is possible to do with the proprietary and open-source drivers for radeon gpus (ATI) would be a bless for mobility

c.

[Ditig]

Thanks cellstije. I'll look into nvclock although PowerMizer would be a more optimal solution.

Originally Posted by cellstije

try nvclock:

http://www.linuxhardware.org/nvclock/

i use it on my laptop with gforce go 6200TC to underclock the gpu.
The following comand forces the gpu memory at 200hz and its core at 100hz

nvclock -f m 200 -n 100

[ravi_n]

I will note that my cursory perusal indicates ATI's drivers have better power management in linux (there's an option you can set in your xorg.conf to turn on dynamic clocking), so I'm strongly considering getting a laptop with an ATI card instead of an nVidia card because of this reason.