GPU Power On Battery

I'm not sure why I'm having such a hard time finding an answer, so I'm posting my own thread. Sorry if this is answer is available elsewhere.

On battery, my GPU seems to be getting less power. I have a 570M on Windows 7. How do I change settings to give me full performance? (I know it means my battery won't last long)

 

Go into the nVidia control panel and change the settings to performance or change the windows power plan to performance if it is set to balanced or power saving if you haven't done so before changing the GPU power settings in the nVidia CP. You GPU is not receiving less power, it is being downclocked to use less power.

 

I changed the 'Global' settings to 'Prefer Max Performance' but the framerate is still low. Could the CPU be clocked down too? It is in high performance at the battery.

 

everything when running on battery is going to be downclocked, sometimes you can get it to up the clocks a little, the problem here is that the battery wont provide enough power for everything that it should provide.

 

Right, depending on the laptop. The Sager laptops I owned (briefly) both would downclock to the point that it was essentially netbook performance on battery. Good enough for basic tasks, but no way possible to really play anything substantial. No way to change it either.

 

even on the m14x it aint possible, does your dv6 present the same beahviour?

 

No, lol. But the real kicker is the IGP is actually good enough to play most games at 720p at 30+ fps on battery. So if I go on battery just use the IGP and good to go.

 

thats great to know!

 

Even on battery I set my CPU to 1.8GHz (normal operating max speed) instead of the 2.4GHz I usually have it OC'd to, and can play games with the dedicated GPU fairly well too. One time I forgot to plug in and was playing games for quite a while, no noticeable slowdowns, however, battery life was dismal. But with the 9-cell in most cases can probably get 1.5 to 2 hours on battery gaming, more if I just use the IGP.