Stuart F. Biggar wrote: > Some new notebooks from Lenovo (and others I expect) have two graphics > adapters, one of which is used on battery and the other when plugged in. > There are different ways to save power.
For a long time, adaptive clocking has been part of the NVIDIA driver. Early on, if no 3D applications were present the GPU and memory were clocked down. Only when 3D applications were present did clocks get bumped. On a notebook, run nvidia-settings, choose PowerMizer under GPU 0 and watch what happens when you run glxgears (and what gradually happens after you close it). One obviously problem with this method is running compiz as 3D is present all the time. Recently, better power management was added. The driver now has back-end hooks for A/C and battery events which provide better power management. These will be enabled when we come up with the front-end plumbing to be used by drivers.
