There is nothing wrong with the 7970M MXM

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. There's 2 methods of switchable graphics. There's dynamic, where the drivers choose the GPU for you, and there's fixed, where you choose the GPU to use. AMD supports both methods in their hardware/drivers. Nvidia only supports dynamic switchable graphics in Optimus. My point was that it's illogical to believe that Alienware added their own mux and disabled it for Nvidia cards for some reason instead of just accepting that Alienware is just using the AMD provided fixed switchable graphics. Here's a slide from AMD themselves. No mux.

There are no switchable graphics in the p150hm so I have no idea what you're trying to say.

 

Since M18x R1 and M17x R4 had a dedicated MUX why shouldn`t they have it now? Just google it and you`ll see that Alienware haven`t changed their design. Atleast thats what they are writing

There is very few Nvidia notebooks with MUX switching R3d. Perhaps its more of a AMD thing and maybe Optimus doesn`t play nice with MUX. I have no idea

 

my bad, i thought by fixed you meant non switchable and you were trying to say that nvidia doesnt work with non switchable gfx.
still, i can assure you m17x has a mux, several re-sellers have stated that it does.

 

Good call, Bro. IIRC, AW started using MUX since Sandy Bridge. It's the way to go, IMHO. Yes, you have to reboot/reload drivers but at least there are no glitches in games like with Optimus. I'd never buy a notebook with Optimus or Enduro, unless it could be disabled in BIOS for good.

 

There is no bottleneck at all, its enduro messing around wih GPU utilization, consistently. Why? not really sure why, but its the algorithm it uses to calculate how much GPU % must be used what is mess up, not a hardware part bottlenecking anything.

IMHO.

 

think about what you are saying, why would switchable graphics function on a GPU have anything to do with purposefully limiting that GPUs rendering performance?
Why would anyone put a process to calculate how much GPU must be used? GPU doesnt need to calculate utilization it just runs as fast as its allowed to run.

 

I don't need to google to know that Alienware changed their chipset. Why wouldn't the current models have a mux? Because the connected the video out to the the iGPU, not a mux this time around. Why would Alienware add a mux just to do something that AMD already does?

Let me rephrase my statement then: Fixed graphics can be enabled on notebooks without a mux so the case could be that the newest Alienware notebooks do/do not use a mux. We don't know. But we do know that fixed graphics can be enabled without a mux. So since the possibility that Alienware does not use a mux exists, one cannot just say for a fact that the problem with the P1xxEM notebooks is a hardware problem.

So saying that the main problem with the notebook is how it is constructed like OP did would be unsubstantiated.

Better?

All notebooks with switchable nvidia graphics prior to Optimus used a mux. The only reason why there are less Nvidia notebooks with a mux than AMD notebooks with a mux now is because Nvidia started using dynamic switchable graphics earlier than AMD did so the muxed notebooks were phased out longer ago.

 

It's so you can save power during low GPU use scenarios. E.g. if you're watching a hardware accelerated movie, you don't need all X shaders running. So why not just power gate Y shaders to save power?

This could be useful for desktops, but I don't see much point for notebooks with switchable graphics since you'd be running on the iGPU anyway.

 

ok, i'll humour you. so for whatever reason AMDs switchable graphics implementation decides to limit the GPU's rendering performance in a stupidly complex way, - rather than reducing clock speeds as it has traditionally done for years, it shuts down some shaders or other parts of the GPU... Now that this is done I should still see linear response in my fps when I increase or decrease my clocks. I should also still see an increase in fps if I decrease detail, because I am reducing the amount of processing that GPU has to do... neither of those things happen, fps stays the same regardless of detail or GPU clock settings.
If this was the root of the cause it would also be very easy to fix and we would have received drivers months ago.

 

Yeah I won`t even bother using my time on this thread anymore. So many things to comment. Believe what you want R3d. Lets leave it at that

 

I have not seen any proof that the HM77 chipset has the ability to output it's ports directly over MXM, unless the intel graphics has this ability the dedicated card is simply not connected to the display so can't function by itself.

AMD might have this functionality in their own chipsets but they practically dont exist in this market.

 

Well there were no problems with the previous gen AMD dynamic switchable graphics so it was probably introduced with the enduro relaunch. I'm not saying that the new power gating system is the culprit, but it certainly could be.

 

seriously, thats your answer? so you are basically saying: AMD introduced a new power gating system with their new cards, that is only enabled in switchable graphics configuration, just because? on top of that they are unable to turn this "feature" off and it seemingly has a mind of its own and disobeys laws of logic. ok, totally plausible, im out.

 

It all adds up to the main issue we all point at: ENDURO

This is how i see it, of course i dont have a clue if it works like this or not, thats AMD's little secret:

Enduro works and exists to manage the switchable graphics in the laptop. We all agree what switchable graphics and its main purpose is (saving energy and prolonging hardware life). So how do you manage this simple task?
You create a software that manages when and WHY one or the other GPU is used. This software has default settings, high performance, battery saving, and custom settings, etc, etc.
What these settings basically do is tell the software how to "behave" in a general way. BUT the underlying programming has to communicate with the hardware and tell it what to do. Simply put the instruction shut down or work at x% usage has to be translated into the actual action, that translation aint as straightforward as one may think. In order to cover all sorts of applications, games, programs, etc. the software uses one or more algorithms to interpret what you are using and consequently tell the hardware to behave in one or other way.
It probably is a lot more complicated but the route is something like:
When A is on, then turn off B and use C, and so on, with degrees of usage as well.
This approach explains why when lowering graphic details the % GPU usage lowers as well, yielding similar or the same FPS as high detail settings. Why? Because enduro somehow knows you are setting to lower details and interprets that the GPU should be consequently lower its usage.

The obvious problem is that we DONT want what enduro thinks its what we want, at least sometimes. One should even consider how enduro interprets different commands at the same time, for example if you are running a game, a word document and a browser at the same time, wich one should be preferred in terms of power usage and performance?
The fact that even windows power settings affect the % GPU usage when one lowers the graphic settings (see my post about this) supports my notion. When changing from power saving to performance windows settings (in windows control panel), a user reported %GPU usage and FPS for BF3 in lower settings increased significantly, and he didnt even touch CCC in the process. This clearly shows there is no hardware bottleneck at all, only conflicting software directions telling the card wrongly what it should do in different scenarios.

So its not only a calibration issue (wich would be an easy fix) but a whole reprogramming of sorts, change or modification of algorithms, etc.

BUT its a driver fix in the end, nothing more.

regards
Voz

 

Originally Posted by Marc@AMD
I want to thank all those users that have been patient in this matter, and peristent in providing helpful information and feedback to the community.

We have received some positive news from the Driver Development Team. A driver is planned to be released in the near future that will provide significant improvements to notebooks enabled withAMD Enduro™ Technology.

Please stay tuned to our support.amd.com site for the driver posting.

Source: AMD Game Forums - The Clevo 7970M Enduro/under-utilization debacle.

 

so you dont have a clue, but you are gonna string together an explanation that logically makes no sense anyway.

yes, this software selects which GPU you use this far you are correct.

this is where you just start making crap up. enduro's function is only switchable graphics, it has no built in throttling mechanisms, why would it? When you are not gaming go to HD4000 card, when you are gaming go to 7970m. Once again Enduro does not have any direct control over rendering process its only a switch, - if on take path A, if off take path B. That is it.

so according to you, enduro knows that i am lowering details, but somehow on the very same game engine it runs perfectly at one moment but starts to choke when a certain scenes or objects are displayed? If more players join the match or you look at a specific object it magically drops your utilization...do you know how stupid and pointlessly complicated this sounds? how does it achieve this throttling of performance? it certainly isnt shutting down shaders or reducing GPU clocks, its definitely not choking the power supply to the card... so by what method is this switch-only-function able to cap performance of my grahics card whilst i'm gaming and more importantly why?
dont you think it would be very easy for AMD to disable this imaginary feature, like its disabled on non switchable graphics configurations?

windows power settings affect performance without enduro and on other cards too. what that post referred to above had nothing to do with our issue.
and so far everything, especially BonsaiScott's posts point to a some sort of bottleneck where data has to be transferred from dGPU to iGPU. Thats not to say that it cant be worked around with drivers, Nvidia did it with Optimus so unless AMD do not have the hardware capabilities they should be able to do this as well.

 

Mostly @ R3D:
There's 2 ways to get pixels off an MXM: The pins on the connector for one of the video outputs (there's a lot of them), or the pins for PCIE. That's it.

With current laptops there's one way to get pixels to a monitor: the wires on the monitor cable (or LVDS ribbon in this case).

In the P150, the 'monitor cable' is always connected to the Intel iGPU. The only way to drive pixels to the display is if the iGPU does it. Thus the only way to get pixels from the MXM to the monitor is to transfer it over PCIE into the CPU's memory system, have the intel iGPU pull them out and send them to the monitor. If the drivers are optimum (NVIDIA clearly does a better job in this case) and you're running 640x480 @ 30 hz, cool. But as resolution goes up so does the useless consumption of expensive resources. Eyefinity from a single displayport is coming (here?).

I don't care if it's NVIDIA or AMD, ATI, S3, Matrox, 3DLabs, 3DFX, Qualcomm or MacDonald's. Using MXM-->PCIE-->CPU DRAM-->iGPU-->wires-->monitor is fundamentally broken. MXM-->wires-->monitor being better is FITTCO*. The Alienware M17xR4 (with the mux) has the best of both worlds. Does it work perfectly? Nope. Can you control it manually and get what I want? Yep. That's why I'm buying one. Just wish they made a 15.6" with 1920x1080 (or higher) that will take a high-powered MXM and has a mux.

What I _really_ wish is that the P150 had a user-controllable mux.

* Fundamentally Intuative To The Casual Observer

 

Of course i dont have a clue, do you have a better knowledge yourself?

Enduro only a switch? ehmmm i dont think so, to me it indicates the card to lower its performance on certain settings and situations, not just shut down or on. If it were a mere bandwith issue the %GPU usage wouldnt be affected if enduro is telling it to stay on, does it?
Besides i am not making it all up, i am just taking the info and opinions poured all over.

I can see your point (i.e. you might be right and i might be wrong), you are just not seeing mine, to me enduro does more than just on/off, it wouldnt even have a name if that was the case. Probably as you say it doesnt shut down shaders or lower clocks, but it might control or "limit" some other part of the hardware in order to achieve its goal (lower power usage).
Having not made tests myself i dont know why looking at a point or more players entering affect the FPS, but i do know that has always happened with any card (switchable or not), FPS always go down on more demanding renders. The fact is that if GPU usage is not 100% then the reduce in FPS is much more noticeable, so those more noticeable changes are just consequent.

In your own words "how do you explain that windows power settings affect GPU usage % and FPS?"
I quote the original report:

I quote you again (edited of course) "so by what method is this windows power settings able to cap performance of my grahics card whilst i'm gaming and more importantly why?"

No, not everything point to a bottleneck, thats Bonsai's and some others theory only.

So far i have read thousends of posts and not one of them proves this hardware bottleneck really exists.

I wont argue that a shorter road should be faster than a longer or more stepped one, but that doesnt necessarily means it would be noticeable when we are talking about inches at great speeds. So to me it aint significant and doesnt explain at all why the GPU is underutilized in certain situations.

Just to show you i am not the only one with the notions i try to explain (clearly failing at it, lol) i quote Jarred from Anandtech.

Also i dont understand why if people far more knowledgeable than us (Anandtech and others) say its a driver issue (or at leats a driver fixable issue) you insist its a hardware bottleneck. A bottleneck its a bottleneck, a fat limit, and nothing can improve it without mechanical intervention, and that clearly its not the case.

i have to go work now, will continue later.

Its really interesting to have this exchanges of opinion tho

regards
Voz

 

You know, what? Forget I wrote anything. I just trying to answer your question of "why would the GPU need to calculate how much of it is used".

 

How much faster is the M17xR4 than a P170EM or P150EM with the same nVidia card? I assume you have investigated this? I'm not able to find any direct comparisons. I can find individual benchmarks which are sometimes in Clevo's favor, sometimes AW. Which suggests to me there is no appreciable difference.

"Fundamentally broken" is slightly hyperbolic. It obviously works. It should not be quite as fast as a dedicated mux, but broken? Not really.

 

I think you are confusing symptom with a cause. low GPU utilization is not a cause of this "Enduro issue", its a symptom - something is limiting the performance therefore utilization drops. In other words its a bottleneck (it doesnt have to be a hardware bottleneck) - where the GPU is waiting for something to complete before resuming with rendering. You can replicate this same symptom by enabling vsynch or fps limiter, - a soft bottleneck if you like, where utilization will drop because of it. You can also see the same symptom where your CPU is the bottleneck and it cant feed the data fast enough, or where you reduce your GPU memory clocks too much and it generates another bottleneck. point is, this under-utilization is a sign that your GPU is waiting for something to catch up, its not a problem in by itself.

i think you are missing my point still: 7970m in a laptop that does not support switchable graphics works 100%, and I dont mean gaming - power saving features like AMD's ZeroCore and PowerPlay which do all the power management stuff for these cards: Power efficiency is making a difference! | Game Blog.
If you run that same card in switchable graphics mode, both ZeroCore and PowerPlay are still there and they work the same, so why would then AMD waste their time and program another function and add it to Enduro when officially it only function is just to switch between GPUs ( Extend your battery life with AMD Enduro).

i was not talking about fps, but utilization - it drops based on the amount of stuff 3d engine is pushing to the GPU.

no idea, i havent been able to reproduce his problem, neither has anyone else. maybe he was gaming on battery power?

what method: - usually by reducing clocks. Why: because he has chosen a power saving setting and possibly using battery power.

you seem to cherry pick posts that you agree with and unfortunately you then ignore logic in favour of optimism.

for one, jarred did not know anything about this issue until we invaded his comments section. second, - i have never said this bottleneck is unfixable via driver update. Bottlenecks can be worked around, just like Nvidia did with their "optimus copy engine".

yeah, apologies if my opinions seem somewhat heated, its just after 5 months of trying to accurately diagnose this mess I find it important to have a correct understanding of where the root of the problem lies.

 

Not at all, i think we are both trying to understand more than impose, at least i know i am, i am far behind 95% of these forum members in computer technology, but are eager to learn.
Still sometimes a fresh analysis helps clearing the mist of hard knowledge, and thats all i am trying to acomplish, bringing my point of view to the facts at hand.

At this point we can agree to disagree in only one point, and that is the "bottleneck". I truly think you know better than me about hardware, clocks and what not, but i am still not convinced there is any kind of bottleneck causing the GPU underutilization issues.

One of my biggest weaknesses is expressing my views in few clear words, so i will make my best effort once more just to fail... lol

IF a hardware bottleneck is present why lowering graphic details yields lower GPU utilization, and tehrefore the same or similar FPS? To me that makes no sense at all, since by lowering the graphic details ingame what you are basically doing is telling the game to be simpler (graphically speaking). A good analogy would be a digital picture, if you lower the pixels (graphic detail) the image weighs proportionally and even exponentially less than the original "ultra settings" image, allowing a much faster transfer via internet or between drives, etc.
In the example the bottleneck for transfer speed is bandwith (i assume something similar would be the hardware bottleneck you are talking about.).
So lowering the image details makes it lighter and therefore transfers should be faster, IF we are using the MAX bandwith available (i.e. reaching the bottleneck). If transfer is NOT faster with a lighter image then the problem is not the bandwith bottleneck but rather something else......
Going back to our game, you lower graphic details and therefore the weight of the rendered data is lighter, one expects speed (performance) to go up, but it DOESNT. And here is where you say its a hardware bottleneck, but it cant be because essentially the weight is much less and bandwith keeps being the same.
So unless the hardware bottleneck actually becomes smaller by lowering graphic demands (something physically impossible, unless we are talking about temperature effects) in order to keep the speed the same for a smaller info transfer, there must be something else causing this symptom.

This something else is ENDURO and whatever algorithm it has that produces this undesirable effect, or if its not enduro its another piece of software, but its stil not a hardware part bottlenecking anything.

That is why i quoted Jarred's comment on his own article, because it makes sense that enduro is somehow trying to keep GPU utilization as low as possible as long as a certain value is mantained. This value might be 60 FPS or something like that. BUT the problem arises when enduro "fails" doing what its meant to do, factually crippling your performance.
NOw, why enduro fails? My theories are detailed in my last post, although i really have no clue.

Oh and correct my if i am wrong but FPS its frames per second, and that is in no way a meassure of weight, its clearly not the same to render 60 "ultra" FPS than 60 "low" FPS.

AND maybe the %GPU usage is not managed by enduro at all as you say, thats just a secondary effect of enduro thinking the job is done and telling the card to "stand by". But still thats not a hardware bottleneck.

i hope you can get something because i am a little dizzy right now, roflmao

regards
Voz

 

so what the hell is the op saying? that people who are suffering from performance problems associated with the 7970m, aside from bluescreeens and other problems besides under utilization have nothing to complain about? People pay a pretty penny for this product, it doesnt work as advertised. End of story.

 

Think he's saying the 7970m hardware card is perfectly fine but not software/laptop.

 

Having to hack the hardware design to completely bypass a highly hyped feature of the card in order to avoid a 20-50% performance penalty qualifies as something wrong with the hardware itself. Sorry, not buying your shill.

 

me neither

 

sorry, i think im OT, but could any1 tell what they are discussing about here?

[Sammelthread] 17,3" Clevo P170EM(3) Gamer Notebook (2012) - Seite 58

is it OLD?

 

How bad the audio in the EM series are
How much they want to trade in the 7970M for a 680M
bla bla bla

But most importantly a guy who claims to have some breakthrough with the Enduro problems. It involves changing the EnableULPS in the registry of Windows. I have know idea what ULPS is, but it involves with messing with the power management so that you somehow disable Enduro functions and that the 7970M is always active in 2D mode, aka in the desktop, when browsing the internet etc.

Its a bad translation from google, but the steps are something like this:

1. Go in to Windows safe mode (press and hold F8 during bootup with his machine)
2. Hit the windows button, insert "regedit" to enter the registry
3. Find EnableULPS there
4. Disable it by changing its value from "1" to "0"
5. Not shure about this one, but there are 4-5 entries there, and they should all have the value "0" aka disabled
6. Reboot and you are done
(I think they are using the 12.8 driver)

This fix may cause your fan to increase in speed.
Two people have tried it, one didn`t notice anything, still low GPU utilization and FPS, another one had great results
He noted that his GW2 FPS went from 30-35FPS to 36-64FPS

 

I think if only 2 people tried it, it didn't work. If a fix works, everyone will jump on it.

Anyway, it doesn't matter what is wrong with the 7970m, hardware or software wise. 7970m plus Clevo = a lot of $ for a lousy product that does not perform as well as it should. From the consumer's point of view, it's a broken product. There are only 2 solutions. First, swap out the card and replace it with something else. Second, cross your fingers and hope AMD will provide a solution.

AMD keeping so quiet and low profile just pisses me off. Resellers are still selling the combination as a high end product. It's only creating more victims.

 

Woah, GW2 FPS jumping up like that is a pretty important recording, Mighty_Benduru. Apparently this DOES do some thing. I am going to post this on the AMD gaming thread and see if Marc picks it up.

 

ULPS is AMD's energy management. It's actually mostly used for CF, puts the second card in idle mode when not being used. But the registry changes for 7970M is needed to overclock with Afterburner. It doesn't fix Enduro, it just allows you to overclock right now.

 

But there is a guy in that thread who got a FPS boost in Guild Wars 2 when doing that trick. I think. Perhaps it was overclocking he was talking about then? Google translate is useless sometimes

 

i've had my ULPS disabled a while back as its one of the steps to get OC'ing working on 7970m.

 

hey joe, do you remember the exact steps you made to enable overclocking ? i've follow slickdudes way and tried almost every driver, even with load on the gpu, i'm still stuck at afterburner showing me 0/0 for clock and memory speed, not able to move the slider.

 

You dont need to do anything else than run MSI kombustor or diffrent dx application to make the 7970m come alive. Than run afterburner and you can overclock with no problem..

 

Meanwhile in the Alienware forum:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...talyst-12-x-9-001-september-4-unofficial.html

A place where one can be proud to own a 7970m.

Wake me up when October ends.

 

Extremely angry. I want 55+fps BF3 ultra.

 

I would've been happy with 40 frames per seconds in World of Warcraft. But this was too hard for a 2000$ laptop ... Definately no problems with 7970m, suuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

 

as i said... always ran kombustor first. not working, sliders stuck at 0/0 no matter what driver or afterburner version i'm using.

 

Dunoo than, seeing your comments you probably tryed everything possible, so theres something weird..It worked for me with almost every driver I installed, I think that with one or two it didnt.. But with stock no problem , also 12.7 betas, 12.8, and the 9.0.0.1 that I'm using right now installed ower thestock ones.
I just run kombustor than msi afburner and no problems. I can even bench and game at 1060/1560 stable. Just to remind that I'm using the 2.2.1 msi afterburner paccage( I know that yuo need to ad something in th enew versions)
Also check if you have the MSIkombustordx11.exe set to high performance and also afterburner in swithchable graphics..

 

recent news guys, maybe the grief is at an end...

 

Original Post 9/12/12:
Conclusions:
1) The M17x-R4 hardware does it right, but the drivers for that seem to be less than optimal (manual works, automatic doesn’t always)
2) Clevo (and others) could have done it the same way but chose not to
3) NVIDIA does iGPU/MXM ‘switching’ (which isn’t really) better than AMD
4) New AMD drivers can make it much better
5) There’s nothing wrong with the 7970M MXM

Validation this week:
"Catalyst 12.11 Official Beta is releasing today @3PM ET. Great improvements AND Enduro fixes."
"I'm getting 70-100 FPS now in MP3. I'm liking this 12.11 a lot. "
"Dude, Battlefield 3 is running so much better. "
...

 

Want a cookie? We've all been saying it was a driver issue, so I don't get your point. Is it just for you to gloat? Do you even have a 7970M? Are you even invested in this issue?

 

And it still has issues. The discrete GPU still does not work with some programs (found that out today with Dolphin, heard it doesn't work with Photoshop either).

 

Good reason for Dolphin, Emulators are almost all CPU, not GPU...

 

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't see the discrete GPU, lol. I get worse performance on my NP9170 than on my G73jh because of this.

 

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