After upgrading to BIOS version 3.05, I noticed that the battery drains when loading both the CPU and GPU in games on the 180W PD charger. It seems like I’m not the only one, as others have posted a bug report in Framework’s firmware issue tracker (FW16 BIOS 3.05 Battery Now Drains on Balanced Power Profile · Issue #33 · FrameworkComputer/SoftwareFirmwareIssueTracker · GitHub). Has anyone else had this issue after installing BIOS 3.05?
There is a Bug in 3.05, that the dGPU is unlocked even in Balanced, so yes, you can not change this Behaviour until Frameworks releases a new Bios Revision.
Seems I completely missed it in the Known Issues on the FW16 BIOS 3.05 release page. Thanks.
Silver lining is that the battery at least won’t drain till empty, once it gets in the 30-60% range it will move the power target around so-as to keep the battery from depleting.
Really hope that 3.06 will nail both this bug and the dGPU power delivery when connected on 240w chargers… Go Framework!!!
Do we have any indication as to when we might expect either a hotfix or the next bios update?
When it hits the 30-60%, does it essentially act like it used to before the regression? i.e. if I have a long gaming session, and I let it get down that low, am I going to experience “low battery” fps drops, or is it simply going to re-adjust to what it’s supposed to be and continue to have good performance?
In my experience it drops to about 60-70W of dGPU power during that time. I’ve never been able to notice it in-game despite watching the fps counter and pixel peeping. So, yes, it just adjusts to an acceptable performance level. The only real downside besides extra wear and tear is if you wanted to have a gaming session and then run off to class or in my case a coffee shop and use the battery, then your battery won’t be starting at 100%. For these cases it’d be nice if balanced kept the battery at 100%.
Alternatively, you can look at it as when the battery is above a certain percentage, you have an extra power boost to the dGPU for a little while.
is there any indication this might get fixed soon? It’s causing issues in how long I can use the device continuously under heavy workloads
What do you mean by this? Even with the battery drain, the device will not shut off. Power targets are adjusted with the battery level automatically.
Having the dgpu stuck in performance mode is causing temperatures to rise too and thermal throttle. In balanced mode, the temperatures are more stable and lower
That sounds like a separate issue - My dGPU has never hit over 75 degrees - even when running benchmarks or playing games w/the wattage set to 110w.
The Framework 16 is not able to thermal throttle because of the dGPU. The gpu is not physically/thermally connected to the CPU.
If there is any thermal throttling take a look in the “Uneven CPU Thermals” Thread.
Anything because of the dGPU staying in Performance Mode is Power and Battery related.
I think I was misdiagnosing a separate issue. One of my games had started glitching out pretty much the same time the bios update happened and I attributed it to throttling, but I think the game itself might have had a breaking update at the same time, since other, more intense games do not cause any issues at all
Just tested this just in case, and I’m getting >15k points, which I saw in your replies in that thread means I’m not throttling, so whatever my issue is must not be related to this. thanks