M580m low performance on battery

Is it normal that you can't game on the battery alone? I was at the airport with free wifi so I started a game of crysis, but getting low fps, once I found an outlet fps return to normal. I even check the power management and made sure gpu is on performance and still lags bad, like 5fps unplugged

 

The battery in gaming laptops can't run the Video Card at full speeds, so it downclocks to a stable level where the battery can handle the load. Sadly These laptops are pretty much stuck near an outlet while gaming.

 

Yes, all gigantic Alienwares with power hungry cards are going to be throttled down to severe levels to protect the battery. My R2 isn't usable when it is unplugged. Idle I get 1.3 hours.

 

At least we can use the igpu on the newer ones and get decent battery life while doing light tasks.

 

Sorry for going off-topic here, but i have an question about this.
Would the system shut off / would damage be done to the battery, if you would manually flash the vBIOS of the card to not be able to down-clock?

For the ATI, you can set different "clock-stages", such as battery-mode, power-saver mode, etc...Setting all these stages to the regular clock, would it prevent downclock? Would it damage the battery / system?

Edit:
Thank you GeoCake!

- Scott.

 

No, it doesn't work like that. The battery is not able to provide that amount of power, so it just runs at lower clocks.

The M11x is able to run full clocks on battery because the CPU/GPU combined (about 60W for the whole system) do not require as much as a 580M (100W on its own).