igpu, power consumption, and voltage shift issues

[Drowningfish223]

Hey @jaromeyer!

Great guide! I have the 4k i7 xps. Almost everything works so far on Catalina 15.6. The only issues I've noticed are that the IGPU will be stuck at 350 mhz after sleep sometimes, power management can be a bit weird, and voltage shift does not keep its offsets after sleep. I have disabled hibernate and thunderbolt, so I know they're not the problem.

The power management issue I have only occurs when not plugged into a monitor. After boot, Intel power gadget shows a power draw like this:

After 1 sleep, power management reporting gets messed up. Intel power gadget reports a lower package power than just the DRAM power. The good news is that the reported draw is lower.

After a few more sleeps (the number changes), Power consumption increases and the GPU is locked to 350 mhz. I lose about 2 hours of battery life when this happens.

xxxzc has a similar repo, and he describes the same issue with the GPU locking to higher frequencies at the end of this thread: https://github.com/xxxzc/xps15-9570-macos/issues/46

Do you experience the same problem? Also, how's battery life on your end?

Thank you!

[jaromeyer]

Personally I have the FHD model and I'm running the latest developper beta of BS. Make sure you are using the proprietary Apple GuC firmware by adding "igfxfw=2" to your boot args. Thats the only way I was able to get the iGPU clocking properly. When using the host scheduler I also experienced it getting stuck 300-350MHz after sleep. Also have you disabled your touchscreen? That saves quite a lot of power because its always polling. With light work (coding and streaming music) I get 8+ hours of battery life.

[jaromeyer]

And why does coconutBattery report a 16" MBP? You should be using a MacBookPro15,1 SMBIOS, nothing else.

[Drowningfish223]

Oh shoot! I was a bit sleep deprived yesterday and I realized I never mentioned that I actually have a xps 7590. I created my own OpenCore config, but I was having sleep and power management issues. Your repo had ssdts that aren't in the dortania guide, so I decided it would be worth a try. I just had to exchange the ssdt-plug in the repo for the one I made myself and change the smbios. It worked great! I will add that disabling the touchscreen was super helpful for my battery life. I can squeeze out 8 hours with just word editing if the touchscreen is disabled. That's pretty close to windows battery life.

I wasn't using your latest release, though, so I updated and made sure to add the GuC boot arg. So far I haven't had any permanent power issues with the GPU. However, the app store doesn't work and it locks the igpu to 1.15 ghz until the next sleep. Do you have the same problem?

Again, thanks for your great work!

[jaromeyer]

Ok that will make it more difficult. Imo 8 hours is pretty good and you wont be getting much more. About GuC, I've read that it can get stuck at 1GHz but it never happened to me with the latest Big Sur Beta. The host scheduler however (without igfxfw=2 always gets stuck at 350MHz for me). App Store is probably NVRAM related.

[Drowningfish223]

I cleaned NVRAM but the app store or safari still caused the igpu to lock to 1.15 ghz occasionally after sleeps. I downgraded to Lilu 1.4.4 and weg 1.3.8, which are the first combo to support GuC. I haven't had any power management issues since. I'll upgrade to Big Sur when it comes out and let you know how it goes. Thanks for your documentation!

[toonvanstrijp]

@jaromeyer where exactly do you need to specify the "igfxfw=2" inside the config.plist? Cause I can't seem to find any boot options there :)

[Drowningfish223]

@ToonvanStrijp Add it in the NVRAM section of the config as a boot-arg

[imraan-go]

macOS Big Sur fixes this issue. Just use the latest WEG and boot arg "igfxfw=2"