GFXCARDSTATUS EXTERNAL DISPLAY MAC OS X
GFXCARDSTATUS EXTERNAL DISPLAY PRO
GFXCARDSTATUS EXTERNAL DISPLAY SERIES

GFXCARDSTATUS EXTERNAL DISPLAY PRO

2010 or newer MacBook Pro with at least two GPUs.

GFXCARDSTATUS EXTERNAL DISPLAY MAC OS X

Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion).2008 or newer MacBook Pro with at least two GPUs.Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to 10.7.5 (Lion).Ī fork of gfxCardStatus was created to address similar, though less common, issues in MacBook Pros with Nvidia GPUs.

GFXCARDSTATUS EXTERNAL DISPLAY SERIES

It was identified as a viable workaround to extend the life of MacBook Pro models with failure-prone Radeon HD 6000M series GPUs from AMD by minimizing their use. This version was quickly downloaded over 140,000 times.

GfxCardStatus 2.0.1, which added support for 2011 MacBook Pro models with AMD GPUs, was released in March 2011. Users found that manually switching from a power-hungry discrete GPU to the more efficient built-in Intel Core GPU could significantly improve battery life. I had to reboot my Mac following the Twitterrific stall, but otherwise nothing else was harmed.GfxCardStatus 1.0 was announced on the MacRumors forums as a ' public beta' in Spring 2010. Restarting Bus圜al fixed the problem, and it turns out the program offers an optional setting to not use Core Animation. In my testing, Bus圜al 1.6, for example, wouldn’t advance the month correctly, and Twitterrific froze my machine. The former is simply a shortcut for disabling the aforementioned Automatic Graphics Switching setting the latter actually forces apps to use limited resources, as if the apps were running on a Mac, such as the 13-inch MacBook Pro, with only an integrated GPU.īefore using the Integrated Only option, though, make sure you quit all applications listed under Dependencies, as some programs don’t take kindly to having the expected GPU pulled out from under them. If you’re especially worried about battery life, gfxCardStatus lets you force the issue by choosing Discrete Only or Integrated Only from the utility’s menu. But the most valuable part of gfxCardStatus to me is that its menu lists which specific running apps are dependencies, or using discrete graphics, so I can quit them when I need to eke out more time from the battery’s charge. Growl notification whenever the GPU changes.īy watching for these changes, you can get a better idea of which tasks cause your MacBook Pro to use the power-hungry GPU. You can also configure gfxCardStatus to display a The menu’s icon reveals, at a glance, which GPU is in use: i for integrated or d for discrete. The solution is gfxCardStatus, which runs as a systemwide menu. The Energy Saver pane of System Preferences lets you disable the Automatic Graphics Switching option, but doing so actually forces the computer to use the discrete GPU, an option that drains the battery even faster. The only way to make sure you’re using the integrated GPU is to quit applications that rely on the discrete GPU, since OS X doesn’t let you choose to stick to the latter. So even if you’re working from battery power and trying to minimize battery usage (by turning down screen brightness, for example), you may still be using discrete-graphics-card cycles-and, thus, more energy. The problem is, some applications you wouldn’t think need a lot of graphics power actually rely on features such as OS X’s Core Animation that require the discrete graphics card. Some quick background: All 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro models from 2010 and later, as well as 20 models outfitted with an Nvidia GeForce 9400M/9600M GT, dynamically switch between a low-power (and lower-performance) integrated Intel graphics chip and a power-hungrier (and better-performance) discrete Nvidia or AMD graphics card, based on the needs of running applications.

Gfxcardstatus external display