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MacBook Pro Does Not Support Both GPUs Simultaneously

Wild-Bill said:
Another EPICFAIL for Apple. :(
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LOL...

If Apple's success were to be linked to what MacRumor's readers feel was "positive".... :rolleyes:

- Mac OS 9 >> Mac OS X: FAIL
- iPod: TOTAL FAIL
- PPC >> Intel: COMPLETE AND UTTER MOST BIG FAIL IN TEH WORLD SUX0RZ!!

Please...

Apple has used the nVidia Hybrid tool to let the MacBook Pro use it for better battery life reasons, and as it is now on Leopard, this pretty cool feature needs a log-out to enable your own pref.
In most cases, if you're running on the battery you won't ever use the 9600.
If you happen to use the power adapter you get the extra BHP of the 9600...!

Of course, it would be even better if you could switch on the fly... and hopefully with 10.6.

As for SLI.... come on....who really cares about that kind of 3D performance on a laptop. Besides.. many games in the Windows world don't even get any advantage at all with being able to use SLI enabled 2 x GeForce 8800... :rolleyes:
 
So what's the point of having two then, that makes this almost useless.

And you have to logout to switch? What a debacle.

Hopefully it's just a software limitation that can be fixed soon, I absolutely would not buy one of these until they fix BOTH issues.
 
slackpacker said:
Well it looks as if the 178 Drivers are not out for the Mobile Processors yet.

So right now Vista from boot is default to the 9600M GT since there is NO way to switch to the motherboard based GPU.

for a 2.53 Ghz/9600M GT, the Vista Performance score is 5.3 with the current drivers 176.44

Also Vista supports the full 4gb of Ram installed


Its up to Apple and Nvidia to release these drivers for Windows or a new Version of BootCamp and then I'm sure it will work under windows at least.
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What version of windows vista did you use to see does 4Gb? :confused:
 
Hi
slackpacker said:
Its up to Apple and Nvidia to release these drivers for Windows or a new Version of BootCamp and then I'm sure it will work under windows at least.
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That was one positive for using Intel. Even though those using Intel chipsets could force using their drivers. NVIDIA seems the worst, followed by ATI. What am I blabbering about? Unlike desktop chips, NVIDVA and ATI leave it up to the manufacturer using their GPU chips to customize the driver and both only supply a few general drivers for their mobile GPUs. Kind of annoying since most companies slack when it comes to providing recent drivers. Take a look at Dell's but more so HP's software download section. Come to think of it, Toshiba is pretty terrible at keeping provided drivers up to date. I like to get them directly from the manufacturer of the component, if possible ( Realtek, Atheros, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, ... )

While I got a rant going. Since NVIDIA has the chipset provide Ethernet functionality ( others usually go with a third party: Realtek, Broadcom, Marvell, ... ) the Ethernet driver [emulator] can be a bitch to upgrade if the NVIDIA installer doesn't do it properly. I haven't seen a big issue in Vista yet ( thankfully ) but in XP I've had the loop problem a handful of times. The NVIDIA installer will try to uninstall the current version of the Ethernet driver, restart the computer, and than try to install the new version...Except, it keeps saying the same thing over and over and over.
 
Having to log out to switch GPUs is lame, but I can see how switching on the fly would be a huge pain in the ass to implement. Changing the display architecture to support this feature would be a big undertaking, likely would introduce bugs, and would only be used by (some) MacBook Pros.

So it wouldn't surprise me that they never fix this, unless for some reason SJ gets a bug up his pants about it and makes it a big priority.
 
This is strictly a software issue

Hybrid SLI is not supported in OS-X - it has nothing to do with the 9400/9600M chips, both of which fully support Hybrid SLI in both modes. The EFI implementation also limits the function of this chips under Windows. This will change before or when Snow Leopard arrives.

10.5.6 will enable Hybrid Power mode which will link the use of either the integrated GPU or discrete GPU with the Energy Saver modes. This will save the need to log-out, but will do nothing else.

10.6 will enable SLI across the board for all Macs, allowing Hybrid SLI to work as well (this will give about a 50% boost to games running on the MBP). It will also introduce OpenCL which can use any of those unused GPU processors to do non-graphics work (e.g., Transcoding, Folding@Home, Game AI and physics, or CUDA-like super-processing).
 
soapsuds said:
Having to log out to switch GPUs is lame, but I can see how switching on the fly would be a huge pain in the ass to implement. Changing the display architecture to support this feature would be a big undertaking, likely would introduce bugs, and would only be used by (some) MacBook Pros.

So it wouldn't surprise me that they never fix this, unless for some reason SJ gets a bug up his pants about it and makes it a big priority.
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you're right but still, it's seems wrong to have such a half baked feature in such a "perfect" machine.. make them a little thicker, with a bigger battery and kick out the slower GPU.. but nowadays form dictates function @ apple.. and I'm getting slightly sick of these crippled iphones and notebooks from them.. come on you shouldn't worry about the processors in your computer, let the software decide when to kick in the second GPU if they really want to keep it,, that's what apple is all about.. tsst
 
spinko said:
you're right but still, it's seems wrong to have such a half baked feature in such a "perfect" machine.. make them a little thicker, with a bigger battery and kick out the slower GPU.. but nowadays form dictates function @ apple.. and I'm getting slightly sick of these crippled iphones and notebooks from them..
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So go buy something else. :rolleyes:
 
arn said:
That doesn't sound right. What version of Mac OS X did it come with? 10.5.4? (seems unlikely)

The new MacBook Pros (as do all new Macs) ship with a special version of Mac OS X to support it. These changes are integrated into the next major Mac OS X release (10.5.6).

arn
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My MBP I bought yesterday came with 10.5.5 -- I had to update to get the duel gfx control and touchpad options. (10.5.6)

It was in the first 10 sold on launch day...maybe some of the first loaded ones were done before 10.5.6 was ready?
 
Bubba Satori said:
Must be tiring to not have any other reply other than to parrot that over and over again.
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Yes and I'll keep replying like that because you all fully know there are other alternatives besides Apple products just just chose to b!tch. ;)
 
zorinlynx said:
You forget that Woz doesn't *want* to run Apple. He'd rather be doing other things, which he has done over the years. :)
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I know. If he did come back I bet we'd have a much larger range of computers to chose from. Where function was more important than anorexic bling and that got updated on a timely basis with the rest of the computer businessws at non-extortionate prices for the same bloody hardware. :mad:
 
slackpacker said:
Its up to Apple and Nvidia to release these drivers for Windows or a new Version of BootCamp and then I'm sure it will work under windows at least.
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I doubt nVidia will release special BootCamp drivers for Windows. nVidia's focus is on Windows and Linux.
 
On Battery or not, I tend to use strictly the 9600m GT. The power it uses hasn't made me run to an outlet yet, but I have had this for only 24 hours now.

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This is OBVIOUSLY gonna be a massive feature of Snow Leopard.... one more reason to give over even MORE money... harumph.
 
Bubba Satori said:
Yes, GPUs have done that for several years now.
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There's a limit to that, sadly. You can't downclock it by much (around 100%) because the chips are designed to work within certain clock speeds. My Macbook's Core (1) Duo idles at 1.0 GHz and goes up to the full 2.0 GHz only for fractions of a second usually. When doing CPU intensive stuff, it doesn't even stay at 2.0 because either the RAM is too slow to feed the CPU with data or the controler tells it to slow down else it would overheat. This is why you don't really feel a difference between a 2.4 GHz and a 2.8 GHz CPU in terms of performance, the 2.8 GHz can't work at peak speed for long in a laptop, you just can't cool them that well. With adequate cooling (liquid nitrogen and a big pump), you can pretty much double the CPU speed actually, the Core 2 is great for overclocking.

Anyway, you can't underclock indefinately. The integrated chip probably performs better and using way less power than the dedicated GPU at lowest speed.
 
Bubba Satori said:
I know. If he did come back I bet we'd have a much larger range of computers to chose from. Where function was more important than anorexic bling and that got updated on a timely basis with the rest of the computer businessws at non-extortionate prices for the same bloody hardware. :mad:
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Actually, it's hard to find cheap laptop with 802.11n, Gigabit Ethernet, the ability to drive a 30" external display, 5 hours of battery, DDR3 memory and that Front Side Bus. Also, these are the newer Core Duos, they're faster and have more cache. The new Macbook Pros are competitive actually. And there's this huge multitouch trackpad that I personally prefer over a mouse and the nice backlit keyboard and slot loading optical drive. Those are all luxury features that you could live without, but they're so nice. And that unibodies are built like tanks, try to bend a Macbook Air, they're the most robust laptops I've met, even beats the old IBMs.

slackpacker said:
Sorry but no such version of OS X exists (10.5.6) to the Public... You have 10.5.5
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The new Macbook (Pro) comes with a different OSX build than regular 10.5.5. There's a new trackpad preference pane and the energy saving pref now has an energy saving bulb as icon.

I guess Apple does this to avoid the "I discovered an upcoming feature in the OS update" that hint to new hardware features. The rest of us will probably get the same stuff on the next update... or never. After all, it's obsolete hardware by now.

Speaking of software updates:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3174
 
I find this kind of ridiculous. If your battery is running so low that you need to log out and switch GPUs how much battery are you going to have left to finish your work? If it was a matter of some people wanting higher graphics performance, then they should have made the dedicated graphics and option. A was of space on the logic board that could have been used for firewire.
 
OpenCL and SLI are the cat's meow :)

See, if the MacBook motherboard with the 9400M was the same in both the MB and MBP, and the 9600M was an MXM add-on board, it might make sense to include both. The fact that it's not indicates that Apple has bigger plans for these two chips than we know of right now.

SLI and OpenCL are the answer.

Also, a response to GPU down-clocking, yes, most GPU's support this, but with a dedicated GPU, you still need to power the VRAM as well. So even if a 50% clocked 9600M is about the same as a 100% 9400M, there's still the matter of the memory. More-so, the 9400M can go down to 50% too, saving even more power. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't already do this.
 
donga said:
sounds like real gimmicky tech
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Only if you can't see the use of GPU's beyond cool 3D effects. There are codecs, transcoding, things like SETI and Folding@Home, advanced AI and physics in games, and more. OpenCL is, by definition, OPEN, and even the simple 9400M provides twice the computational power than the CPU. GPUs will be the only way we can maintain Moore's Law once CPUs reach their limit (which I think they're fast approaching).
 
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