#GFXCARDSTATUS PRO#

So instead of 7 hours of continuous operation, the Retina MacBook Pro running any of these apps might instead only last 6 to 6.5 hours under similar conditions. And seemingly innocuous apps, including Twitter, Reeder, Transmit, PathFinder, Skype, Delicious Library, Drive Genius, and NetNewsWire, among others, could cause the discrete GPU to power on and run as long as they are open. These frameworks rely on GPU acceleration and gain a performance advantage from running on better hardware.īut running the discrete GPU also consumes considerably more power. Other frameworks that cause an automatic switch include OpenGL, OpenCL, Quartz Composer, and CoreGraphics. The reason is that Apple's system automatically switches to the higher-powered GPU when apps use certain graphics-related frameworks, like CoreAnimation. When Apple first introduced automatic switching with the Sandy Bridge-based MacBook Pros in 2010, users discovered that some apps that shouldn't require the power of a discrete GPU were in fact causing OS X to switch anyway. It was merely a side effect of Apple's implementation of automatic switching between integrated graphics and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M GPU. The issues we ran into that caused our less-than-stellar battery life the first time around were actually nothing new. To achieve this, we overrode Apple's automatic graphics switching using the donation-ware app gfxCardStatus to force OS X to rely solely on Intel's integrated HD4000 GPU.

But we've been using the Retina MacBook Pro a little more since our review published a couple of weeks ago, and have discovered that the massive 95Whr battery is actually capable of lasting at least 8 hours or more. Despite the larger battery, though, we were a little disappointed in the battery life we experienced while reviewing it, which was a half hour or more shy of Apple's promised 7 hours. The Retina MacBook Pro eschews spinning mechanical drives-both optical and magnetic varieties-for solid state flash and tons of extra battery.

Gfxcardstatus