Graphics Lag on Battery Power revisted - any opinions?

[chosenwolf]

Hey guys,

After upgrading to Leopard, I am still getting very choppy animations (dashboard, expose, stacks, etc.) on battery power only. On A/C power, graphics are extremely smooth.

I noticed that when I'm on battery power, if I open up iTunes and scroll through coverflow for a few seconds the animations turn smooth as well as all other functions. The animations remain smooth for a minute and then go back to being choppy. Do I just have a faulty ATI x1600 driver? Is it possible to remove and reinstall the driver somehow? Can anyone explain this phenomenon?

Thanks!

 

[Eidorian]

What are your Energy Saver settings for battery power?

 

[chosenwolf]

What are your Energy Saver settings for battery power?

I've tried them all on battery power, same result. They have no effect whatsoever on the lag. I think the energy settings only really let you control the time to sleep for the mac/display after inactivity.

 

[Screwball]

Same here, running a 15" Penryn with 8600m GT. I would love to have this sorted out

 

[ebayhelp]

Same here, running a 15" Penryn with 8600m GT. I would love to have this sorted out

i would love to try this out right now but if i take out my battery theni have to use it on battery until it goes below 94% then charge it again and i don't wanna do that

 

[chosenwolf]

Same here, running a 15" Penryn with 8600m GT. I would love to have this sorted out

Wow, it's happening with NVidia equipped Macbook Pro's also? I thought it was an ATI driver certain for sure.

So far, I've tried:

1) changing the energy settings
2) disable beam sync tools
3) run sudo codes
4) download ATI utility that has very little configuration options
5) archive and install
6) erase and install
7) go back to tiger (running leopard currently)
8) leopard graphics update 1.0 in 10.5.2

Nothing has worked so far. The only way I can get them smooth on battery power is to launch iTunes and run through albums in coverflow mode for a few seconds, but then again, that only solves the problem for a minute. This issue has been bugging me for over a year now.

=/

 

[alphaod]

When you turn on battery mode, the CPU is slowed, the GPU is slowed, and the PCI/PCI-E bus is slowed.

 

[chosenwolf]

When you turn on battery mode, the CPU is slowed, the GPU is slowed, and the PCI/PCI-E bus is slowed.

It can't be the case on all machines as I've seen macbooks with ZERO slowdowns on battery power (all animations smooth).

It has to be some sort of bug holding it back because the graphic apps (expose, dashboard, etc.) are certainly capable of running without glitches or hiccups on battery power as experienced by the iTunes quirk I mentioned.

 

[Screwball]

I've also seen Macbooks running animations without one glitch while running on battery power,so i firmly believe this is not hardware related! I never experienced such things with my previous Macs, albeit those were running Tiger! Just the other day i was playing around with a Macbook 2.16 C2D 1GB, and it was just fine with Expose etc. on battery, so i cannot see why a clearly more advanced Penryn MBP shouldn't pull off the same trick! What I/We can do is hang in there until Snow Leopard is released, as we cannot go back to Tiger. I wish i could! As much as i love my current MBP, Leopard has yet to win me over! I really have high hopes for Snow Leopard..

 

[tecknical]

mine works just fine on battery power. i listen to itunes 24/7 literally and i always use coverflow. it worked fine yesterday, even on 10% battery (i was calibrating it) so maybe you just have a glitchy comp. try to take it to the genius bar and see what they say

 

[winninganthem]

mine works just fine on battery power. i listen to itunes 24/7 literally and i always use coverflow. it worked fine yesterday, even on 10% battery (i was calibrating it) so maybe you just have a glitchy comp. try to take it to the genius bar and see what they say

Ditto, I've been pretty lucky in never experiencing any GPU lags on battery power. Playing with Photoshop on battery power never seems to slow down either.

 

[Eidorian]

Animations are just fine on my MacBook while on battery power. I do seem to remember a rash of issues like this being brought up in the past as well.

 

[chosenwolf]

I did some more experimenting tonight, primarly with ATI Tool 2.5 for Windows using VMWare. When I run various tests with it, my MBP animations are very smooth on battery which highly leads me to believe that this is just some bug that can be fixed via some code! If anyone can solve this bug and it works on my machine, they have $100 from me via PP or a 1/2TB Lacie External Drive.