NVIDIA PowerMizer – How to Disable It

nvidia

I've been trying to turn off nvidia PowerMizer (that is set the performance level to 2 – max). I can do it with nvidia-settings, but it goes back to default after restart. Here's what I have tried:

nvidia-settings as root – saving settings to xorg.conf and ~/.nvidia-settings-rc
adding options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222" to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf – nothing happened
adding Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerLevel=0x2" "PowerMizerLevelAC=0x2" to xorg.conf under device section : gdm did not start up – had to delete xorg.conf to recover
adding Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x0" to xorg.conf: nothing happened

Any idea how I can do this?

P.S. Ubuntu 12.10

Best Answer

You need to remove whatever you've added to xorg.conf, and add something like the following:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "NVIDIA GeForce"
  Driver     "nvidia"
  Option     "RegistryDwords" "PerfLevelSrc=0x3322; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1"
EndSection

PerfLevelSrc=0x3322 means it's going to use fixed PowerMizer mode when on AC.

PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1 defines the power mode, with 0x1 being Maximum performance.

There is no need to reboot, just logout/login.

Related Solutions

Nvidia Xorg Resolution Projector – How to Set 1280×720 Resolution

Success!

After many hours of blindly fooling around with xorg.conf and xrandr, I found a solution that works.

The problem appears to be:

The Nvidia driver insists on using EDID data from the display rather than anything set by xrandr or in xorg.conf.
For some reason the Nvidia driver couldn't read the EDID data from my projector.

Thus, the solution is to provide an EDID override. I couldn't find one for my particular display, but I was able to find one for some other 720p projector. It works!

After getting the EDID file and putting it some place, it's installed in the xorg.conf file by adding a line like this to the "Screen" section of xorg.conf:

Option         "CustomEDID" "CRT-0:/path/to/edid.bin"

Here "CRT-0" is where the projector is connected: to the VGA port.

One more additional complication is that I couldn't actually find a binary EDID file. Instead, by searching for "720p EDID file", I found some .INF files that contain EDID information extracted by some Windows program. These are Windows .ini format files. They contain the actual EDID information in a block that looks like this:

[OVERRIDDEN-EDID_AddReg]
;Base EDID
HKR,EDID_OVERRIDE,"0",0x01,0x00,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0x00,0x3D,0xCB,0x81,0x07,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x0
0,0x00,0x11,0x01,0x03,0x80,0x6E,0x3E,0x78,0x0A,0xEE,0x91,0xA3,0x54,0x4C,0x99,0x26,0x0F,0x50,0x54,0x20,0x0
0,0x00,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x1D,0x00,0x7
2,0x51,0xD0,0x1E,0x20,0x6E,0x28,0x55,0x00,0x53,0x6F,0x42,0x00,0x00,0x1E,0x01,0x1D,0x80,0x18,0x71,0x1C,0x1
6,0x20,0x58,0x2C,0x25,0x00,0x53,0x6F,0x42,0x00,0x00,0x9E,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xFC,0x00,0x54,0x58,0x2D,0x53,0x5
2,0x38,0x30,0x35,0x0A,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xFD,0x00,0x3B,0x3D,0x1E,0x2E,0x08,0x00,0x0A,0x2
0,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x01,0x5A

To turn that into a binary file, I wrote the following tiny Python script:

#!/usr/bin/python

# first item was 0x01

s = "0x00,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0x00,0x3D,0xCB,0x81,0x07,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x11,0x01,0x03,0x80,0x6E,0x3E,0x78,0x0A,0xEE,0x91,0xA3,0x54,0x4C,0x99,0x26,0x0F,0x50,0x54,0x20,0x00,0x00,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x01,0x1D,0x00,0x72,0x51,0xD0,0x1E,0x20,0x6E,0x28,0x55,0x00,0x53,0x6F,0x42,0x00,0x00,0x1E,0x01,0x1D,0x80,0x18,0x71,0x1C,0x16,0x20,0x58,0x2C,0x25,0x00,0x53,0x6F,0x42,0x00,0x00,0x9E,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xFC,0x00,0x54,0x58,0x2D,0x53,0x52,0x38,0x30,0x35,0x0A,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xFD,0x00,0x3B,0x3D,0x1E,0x2E,0x08,0x00,0x0A,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x01,0x5A"

s = "".join(map(lambda x : chr(int(x, 16)), s.split(",")))

f = open("edid.bin", "w")
f.write(s)
f.close()

Note that you have to remove the first three fields from the line in the .inf file: "HKR,EDID_OVERRIDE,"0",0x01".

To verify that the resulting EDID file was valid, I used parse-edid (part of the read-edid package):

tobin@thinktop:~/pathname/$ parse-edid edid.bin
parse-edid: parse-edid version 2.0.0
parse-edid: EDID checksum passed.

    # EDID version 1 revision 3
Section "Monitor"
    # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
    Identifier "TX-SR805"
    VendorName "ONK"
    ModelName "TX-SR805"
    # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
    # Block type: 2:0 3:fd
    HorizSync 30-46
    VertRefresh 59-61
    # Max dot clock (video bandwidth) 80 MHz
    # DPMS capabilities: Active off:no  Suspend:no  Standby:no

    Mode    "1280x720"  # vfreq 60.000Hz, hfreq 45.000kHz
        DotClock    74.250000
        HTimings    1280 1390 1430 1650
        VTimings    720 725 730 750
        Flags   "+HSync" "+VSync"
    EndMode
    Mode    "1920x540"  # vfreq 60.053Hz, hfreq 33.750kHz
        DotClock    74.250000
        HTimings    1920 2008 2052 2200
        VTimings    540 542 547 562
        Flags   "Interlace" "+HSync" "+VSync"
    EndMode
    # Block type: 2:0 3:fc
    # Block type: 2:0 3:fd
EndSection

So it appeared valid. Indeed, after restarting the X server, I was able to go into the Ubuntu Display settings and click "Detect Displays". It sees my fake 'ONKYO Corporation 50"' display and happily drives it at 1280x720. Required one more X reset to get everything working.

...And this is why we love Linux. (-:

Ubuntu – Resolution changes after startup/login

You did not specify whether you saved your settings to the X configuration file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) using nvidia-settings. That should solve this. Just open nvidia-settings as root:

sudo nvidia-settings

Then, choose the right settings and click on the "Save to X Configuration" button:

enter image description here

If this does not work, there is something else overwriting your settings. Probably your desktop environment. As a workaround, you can use this script:

#!/bin/bash

sleep 10
xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --mode 1920x1080 
echo "Script was run"

The sleep is needed to make sure that the Desktop Environment has finished starting before the script is run. That way, you know that it will be run after the DE has reconfigured your screens. Make the script executable and add it to your startup applications. That should do the trick.

Best Answer

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Nvidia Xorg Resolution Projector – How to Set 1280×720 Resolution

Ubuntu – Resolution changes after startup/login

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