How to get rid of NVIDIA PowerMizer?

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

2 Answers

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.

There is an unofficial patch for recent versions of the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver (334.21 and 337.12) that writes GPU target attributes like GPUPowerMizerMode to the configuration file of nvidia-settings. That means you can use the NVIDIA X Server Settings GUI to permanently set your desired performance level just as it should be.