nVidia GTS 250 Clock rate issues

[Salizar]

I followed tonymac's installation guide and have a running OS X system using the following hardware.

ntel BOXDP55WG, i5 Processor, 4gigs or ram, nVidia GTS 250.

Open GL and Quartz are both working.

 

Noticing that my frame rates with OpenGL where about half of that compared to windows, I decided to update to the latest nVidia Drivers. this had no affect on frame rates. while following the thread about the new drivers I stumbled into a sub discussion about AGPM and nVidia cards. I started looking to the clock rate on my card.

using nvclock I found the clock rates.

 

-- General info --

GPU clock: 300.856 MHz

 

-- Shader info --

Clock: 1782.000 MHz

 

-- Memory info --

Clock: 1101.600 MHz

 

Signon message: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 VGA BIOS

Performance level 0: gpu 300MHz/shader 600MHz/memory 100MHz/0.95V/100%

Performance level 1: gpu 738MHz/shader 1782MHz/memory 1100MHz/1.20V/100%

VID mask: 1

Voltage level 0: 0.95V, VID: 0

Voltage level 1: 1.20V, VID: 1

 

If I'm reading this correctly the card thinks it should be running at the highest clock rate/settings this is reflected by the actual clock rates shown for Memory and Sharer. However the GPU clock rate is sitting at only 300mhz.

This might explain the reason for the sluggish frame rates.

 

I've seen suggestion on setting up the LegacyAGPM.kext, whould this correct the clock rate issues seen above?

 

And is there a guide on setting this up? So far my searches have found nothing that goes through this in detail.

 

I would also like to point out that I have attempted to change the clock via nvclock but it returns the follow message when this is attempted.

 

Unhandled init script entry with id '0x96' at 0xc7d8

Error: NVClock doesn't offer lowlevel overclocking on NV50/G8x/G9x/GT200 hardware (yet).

If you want to overclock your card using the Nvidia drivers instead add the line:

Option "Coolbits" "1" to the screen or device section in your xorg.conf and then try NVClock again.

[jayco437]

If I'm reading this correctly the card thinks it should be running at the highest clock rate/settings this is reflected by the actual clock rates shown for Memory and Sharer. However the GPU clock rate is sitting at only 300mhz.

This might explain the reason for the sluggish frame rates.

 

Same card, same behavior, same "general info" when running nvclock. Did you find a solution by any chance?

 

Edit: The 300mhz bumps up to 738 when I run nvclock while Cinebench is going. I'm guessing this is part of the GPU/graphics power management. But, I still only get 12fps on Cinebench when it's at performance level 1.

 

My 1GB ATI Radeon 4650 gets better scores (20fps) so I might switch back to that. I keep thinking that I'll find the magic incantation of kexts and DSDT changes to get this GTS 250 working but it's just not working out like that. It worked fine in 10.6, 10.6.4 not so much.