Chosen Solution
is there anyway at all to get more juice out of my video card? I have Windows 7 installed for my games, and I’m wondering if there’s either a hardware upgrade I can do, or if there’s a utility to tweak it? any help would be greatly appreciated!
Since this is a 17" Unibody MacBook Pro, it has an Nvidia GPU; so unfortunately, Asle’s suggestion to use ATi software would likely be useless here. That said, there isn’t a whole lot of room for performance gains here, as under full load with fans blaring at full speed (6k rpm) your GPU will likely be running in the neighborhood of 75˚C (conservative estimate). That is, if you manually set your fans with SMC Fan Control at or close to max speed under OS X before rebooting into Windows, which you always should do if you plan on stressing the system with games. The Boot Camp drivers for Windows have very poor (read: almost nonexistent) thermal management, so they will happily let your hardware get up to a toasty 100+˚C before intervening. Actually, OS X will do this as well. But it’s worse under Windows. If you haven’t done that already, then that’s probably causing hardware throttling issues that would limit performance. What David Iwanicki said doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, as from what I can tell, regardless of your power options under OS X, once you’re in Windows, it defaults to the discrete GPU anyway. I have yet to be able to find a way to use the 9400M chip as the graphics output, or get Windows to even acknowledge its presence as more than a simple IO chipset. All that aside, Nvidia’s Windows drivers include performance tools that allow for system overclocking, particularly in the areas of GPU performance, but also with some RAM and CPU options as well. While these options can be enabled in the software on Windows, I have not yet actually attempted to make any adjustments, and do not know if they will actually have any affect given the specialized nature of Apple’s EFI firmware and Apple’s special Boot Camp drivers for the GPU. The Nvidia software claims that the Apple graphics drivers are not recognized (though the hardware is) and that updates would have to be obtained from the hardware vendor (Apple). This is the other reason to doubt whether the available adjustments in the performance tools will have any affect. Before I would even consider attempting any of that though, I would look at improving thermal characteristics. Get a raised cooling pad with fans to blow on the underside of the MacBook. I also ordered some high-performance Arctic Silver “Matrix” thermal paste that I’m using to replace the cheap silicone grease used by the factory, and I’m going to do a proper job applying it as well. Of course, such an operation as removing the logic board and heatsink is not for the faint of heart. But I’m hoping that this will drop at least 3˚C from my operating temps at load; the biggest issue is effectively transferring the heat from the CPU and GPU to the heatsink, which apparently is roughly 5-15˚C cooler than the chips it covers at any given time. I’m hoping to knock at least 5˚C off of the temperature difference under load. I’ve heard stories of people dropping idle temps in their MBP’s from 55˚C to 50˚, and some approaching as low as 45˚C. In the PC world, MacBooks run obscenely hot for pretty much of the time. Laptops in general run hotter than desktops, but MacBooks more so than their PC brethren. These measures should also hopefully improve the lifespan of the hardware, since excessive heat (a.k.a. “normal” operating temperatures in this case) can quickly degrade the internals of microchips. I hope somewhere in this obscenely long post (and posted notably 2 months after the original posted question) someone can find something of use to them.
First of all your MacBook Pro is probably hot enough as it is?? The only solution I have heard of is that you can overclock the video card in Windoz in BootCamp wth the ATI tool, load it into the video card and when you are back in OS X it will be overclocked. I don`t think you can overclock the CPU on a MacBook Pro because it uses an EFI bios and I have not seen any overclockers software support for that.
For these new machines, OS X provides the option of using the discrete GPU and the integrated GPU, or just the integrated GPU for longer battery life. This control is found in System Preferences -> Energy Saver-> Graphics. You can try setting this to “Higher Performance” in OS X and verify after the required logout/login. Restart back into OS X to confirm the setting, then restart in Boot Camp to see if your Windows 7 performance is any better. There may be a similar setting in the Boot Camp drivers for Windows 7: I don’t use Boot Camp personally, but I’ve read some of the features of the newest Macs might not be available to Windows until Boot Camp is updated…
you could try incresing the rem, the video memory is shared with the main memory, so if you have 2GB, the graphics card will allocate 256MB, if you have 1Gb, it will allocate 128MB, if you have 4GB, I’m not sure whether it will allocate 256MB of 512MB
you could either try overclocking or if the games are running with crappy FPS you could try and lower the settings a little
