750m Throttling, Retina MacBook Pro Late 2013

so look at auros X7 pro if you have the mpney (2600$) it resolves your beeds for bext 5years with GTX970M SLI the only thing that might hold you back in this laptop is:
CPU limit when broadwel arrives then you are gpu limited cause this setup even exceeds the fastest desktop single card gtx980
so I recommend you to wait for broad well then aim for the best performance and thinnest notebooks (auoros is super slim) a 970M sli can run games on 4k at ultra pr some times for demanding gAmes very high
again i think GT750M is enough to do SOME gaming considering its a thin laptop i wont need to crank it up to ultra
good luck...

I made an account just to post this. For months now, I have been trying to figure out why my performance in Battlefield 4 seems to degrade within 5 minutes or so after launching the game. I tried everything I could find to try and fix it. Nothing really seemed to help for long before I was right back where I started having made zero progress and still experiencing frame dips.

In my initial quest to make sure BF4 ran as well as it possibly could, I took the advice of the Battlelog community and ran a freeware program called ParkControl. It sets your CPU to its' highest state and disables core parking, a feature of Windows 7 and 8. It made sense to me so I went ahead and did it. That was a huge mistake.

I later noticed that Windows and Throttlestop reported my CPU frequency at 3.4ghz. Weird right? I Googled it with regard to Windows and found that some people reported the same thing and it was likely a bug. So no big deal right?

Well, apparently ParkControl was forcing my CPU to run at its' Boost frequency at all times. This was generating excessive heat which was in turn causing the GPU to throttle.

So for me, the final fix was:

I set my Power Plan to Balanced.

Under Power Options --> Change Plan Settings --> Change Advanced Power Settings, navigate to Processor Power Management. I changed mine to 90% min and 90% max. My CPU will no longer builds excessive heat requiring my GPU to be throttled.

Download and run MacsFanControl whenever you are going to play a game. Set the fans to max while you play.

Download either MSi Afterburner or NvidiaInspector. Either one will allow you to simply apply a GPU core clock offset of +135 through the GUI. I haven't yet tried to overclock the memory but I have never noticed much of a difference with it OC'ed anyway so I left it at the stock setting. I did not need to underclock my memory as I saw someone else posit.

Prior to this fix, I was struggling to run BF4 @ 1600x900 and maintain 60FPS. Now, I am running 1680x1050, Adaptive Vsync enabled, and I saw two frame dips from 60 to 57 during a 20 minute match of Conquest Large. Ultra Mesh, Medium Textures, all else to Low or Off. VERY playable!

Best solution is to clean it. These absorb so much dust compared to Lenovos. No thought on Apple's part was put into keeping the ventilation system from becoming absolutely clogged to **** with dust in a year or less. You will see great differences in performance.

Also keep in mind none of these super thin/light laptop designs are supposed to be used for gaming, video encoding, etc, and will be dead inside 3 years if used for such on a regular basis with a discrete GPU. Buy a desktop for that.

Just to put an end in my journey:

Throttling problems went away and came back, and the experience was not really good. I have a 15" rMBP mid-2012, one of the ones that had image retention too. It was serviced by Apple right after purchase for screen replacement, but the thermals were never good. So, now, almost three years after I purchased, I brought it to Apple for service (AppleCare covered me), and they replaced my motherboard. I can say it's completely different now. Stable framerates, can't feel the throttling. I recommend you doing the same if you are unhappy with the throttling.

Maybe reapplying the thermal paste/changing the fans would solve it, but having a thermal problem for a long time can damage the circuits, so replacing the motherboard you will be 100% sure it will be good.

For gaming and heat I would also like to share some of my experiences.
(MPPr 15", Mid 2014, 2.5GHz, Iris only)
All my gaming is done in Windows 8.1 with an eGPU.

Games will push the CPU often to it's thermal limits and even with the fans running at full blast the CPU will start throttling when hitting 100°C. In some games the frequent chaing of the clock speed can result in a "lagging" game.
What is helping me is the Intel tool:
Intel XTU
With this I limit my CPUs clock speed to 3.0GHz and even lower the voltage of the CPU by 75mV (only 50mV is stable for me in BF4 though). With that setting I get stable 3.0GHz in games and the CPU is hovering between 90-100°C. In some games it isn't even necessary for the fans to work with 100% and are happy with 3500rpm.

Just lowering the voltage will result in a much better overall CPU performance, because the CPU can boost better (and higher than normal). Unfortunately this tool only works in Windows.

Another idea for most people would be to limit the max FPS of the game. Since your display can't show more than 60fps, limit the game to 60fps (or use a tool for that). This will reduce the load on the GPU and CPU.