Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

The GPU downclocks itself due to the uncommon things Dolphin does with the graphics APIs. It doesn't really actively use the GPU like most games do – it often uses API calls that flush the GPU pipeline or stall the GPU, in addition to completely disregarding the GPU for long periods of time (e.g. a few microseconds) while doing VideoCommon stuff on the CPU, which allows it to fall asleep. Disabling the power management entirely just forces the GPU to run at max clockspeed the whole time, thus removing the latency of waking it up. (Forgive any inaccuracies in my explanation, I'm not neobrain/degasus.)

I get all that. It's just that absolutely no one that buys a video card that requires a 500+ watt power supply is interested in having power management hobble the performance of the card under any circumstances. Obviously dolphin is an edge case though.

How far would a request for non libre branch that uses the NVIDIA Graphics SDK to fix this go? Or should I just add that to things nice things rms won't let me have?

That would be illegal. You should add that to the list of nice things NVIDIA won't let you have.

I put it under Optimus on Linux.