Mountain Lion and the death of the Fermi Freeze

[scorcho]

Hello, scorcho here. You may remember me from thatlong thread on the Fermi Freeze under both Snow Leopard and Lion. We shared many potential fixes involving AGPM edits, CUDA background apps, laughs and general hatred towards Apple and Nvidia software engineers.

I'd just like to note that, after months of anecdotal reports from various Mountain Lion beta/developer release testers, I too can now confirm that Mountain Lion's nvidia drivers have eradicated the dreaded Fermi Freeze... for now. You can still choose to edit AGPM in order to ensure that Mission Control and other finder animations are buttery smooth, but otherwise you shouldn't need to for stability anymore.

Remember, for most Fermi cards, the default 0 state is 50mhz, which can cause a bit of UI choppiness till the chip clocks up. I have edited my card's BIOS to make the lowest state 200mhz at the same voltage, which greatly improves the overall feel of the UI (both in Windows and OSX) without dramatically impacting the card's temperature or power draw. If you'd rather not hack the BIOS to attain this, refer back to my previous AGPM edits - which still work to prevent your card from dropping down to the lowest 50mhz state. For instance, in testing the AGPM edit for Mountain Lion, my card routinely settled at 400mhz instead of 200mhz.

So enjoy our new Mountain Lion overlords! Better than the Lion overlords!

 

[Shinji3rd]

Hi scorcho, good to hear from you.

Maybe you can help many of us with this problem: http://www.tonymacx86.com/graphics/62040-problems-gtx-550ti-ml.html

 

[scorcho]

thanks!

and i've just noticed something odd, at least on my system. coming out of a screensaver and power-saving monitor shutdown, my GTX460 will stay at its highest clock speed (800mhz) till I reboot. for some reason the OS loses its ability to manage the card's p-states. reinstalling my edited AGPM and this disappears, with the card eventually going back down to its lowest state (in this case 400mhz) after similar testing.

my system identifies itself as an iMac12,1, FYI.

 

[Albertsw]

thanks!

and i've just noticed something odd, at least on my system. coming out of a screensaver and power-saving monitor shutdown, my GTX460 will stay at its highest clock speed (800mhz) till I reboot. for some reason the OS loses its ability to manage the card's p-states. reinstalling my edited AGPM and this disappears, with the card eventually going back down to its lowest state (in this case 400mhz) after similar testing.

my system identifies itself as an iMac12,1, FYI.

How are you monitoring the speeds?

 

[singj]

Hello Scorcho and others:

I am attempting to consolidate the 550Ti issues here:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/mountain-...00-nvidia-550ti-sleep-wake-freeze-thread.html

Thanks for any insight you can provide!

 

[scorcho]

How are you monitoring the speeds?

Through HWMonitor - it's the evolution of FakeSMC with the addition of a bunch of hardware monitor sensors and an accompanying menubar app that tells you in real time whatever you choose. As you can see from my attached screenshot, the program is reporting to me the CPU's multiplier (16x) and the GPU's clock (405mhz). On my board the program and plugins can also track a variety of voltages, temps and fan RPMs.

HWSensors - InsanelyMac Forum <- Kozlek's page on Insanelymac announcing the program
https://github.com/kozlek/HWSensors <- download the latest version off GitHub.

I believe a version of this is also included in Multibeast.

Now, if you want to measure GPU LOAD, you'd want to use another menubar application - atMonitor

AtMonitor - the interface is a bit of a mess, but it fills a gap sorely missing in OSX - realtime videocard monitoring. I used it extensively while testing out my original AGPM numbers to make sure they switched states quickly.

 

[james_is_15_88]

Uh, yea right. Still get freezes even with agpm modifications

 

[mrazster]

Uh, yea right. Still get freezes even with agpm modifications

Same here...with a 560 Ti !!
Trying to get a grasp on how to edit agpm...but not feeling secure enough !