#158 MacBook Pro - Activation of Hybrid Power Mode in Windows

[Bryan]

As I understand it, Apple has chosen to disable the unibody MacBook Pro's Geforce 9400M when the machine is booted into Windows (referring only to systems with an integrated 9400M and a discrete 9600M GT). As a result, users cannot utilize nVidia's hybrid drivers for nForce chipsets to boost 3D rendering performance.

I would like to find a way to re-enable the device (which currently cannot be viewed in Device Manager, and is therefore unusable). If there's a way to use rEFIt to do this, all the better.

If I'm barking up the wrong tree here, I'd still appreciate any help the community can offer--I'm a recent electrical engineering graduate, so I know just enough about software to seek assistance instead of (potentially) bricking my machine.

[Christoph Pfisterer]

I don't think there's anything rEFIt could do here. This is between the BIOS emulation part of Apple's firmware, and the drivers used on Windows, which would be the Apple-packaged NVIDIA drivers.

[Bryan]

This has nothing to do with Windows drivers. The 9400M is not being initialized during boot--probably because Apple didn't want to futz around with getting Hybrid acceleration to work (hell, they didn't even write a decent Windows trackpad driver until recently).

Where my knowledge ends is the EFI / firmware portion of the machine. Somewhere in there, I'd assume there's a table or a data structure that stores key machine configuration data ... something like:

// Hardware to be enabled during a normal EFI boot
r_cpu0_enable = 1;
r_cpu1_enable = 1;
r_cpu_freq = 2530000000;
...
...

// Hardware to be initialized under BIOS emulation
...
...
r_btloader_GPU0_enable = 1;

(pseudocode, obviously)

I've been told that people have successfully overclocked their machines in Mac OS X by reading, editing, and then re-flashing their MacBook Pro firmware, so I wouldn't be surprising if the process needed to enable the 9400M is very similar.

If you know what kind of tools I'd need to read EFI configuration data, or pull down a copy of my machine's firmware so that I can read through it, please let me know. I'm willing to do the heavy lifting here, if someone can only point me in the right direction.