![]() Turning down screen brightness to just two "dots," a technique I often use to maximize battery life when using a MacBook Air during conferences, caused OS X to report potential battery life as high as 10 hours. I was consistently able to get between 8 and 8.5 hours of continuous use from the Retina MacBook Pro when running integrated graphics only. Here you can set gfxCardStatus to force integrated graphics when on battery power, and automated switching when plugged in, among other combinations. ![]() An advanced tab reveals our favorite feature: power source-based switching (something we've long argued Apple should consider as a power user option). Preferences allow Growl to display GPU change notifications, force gfxCardStatus to load at startup, and automatically check for updates. An option will also display an "n" for NDIVIA or "a" for AMD/ATI depending on the GPU included in your machine.Ĭlicking the icon shows more about the active GPU, a list of any apps that activate the automated switching, and offers an option to force OS X to use either integrated or discrete graphics. The app uses a menu bar icon to display an "i" when using integrated graphics, or a "d" when using the discrete GPU. The latest version, 2.2.1, was released just days after our original review published on June 23, adding support for the Retina MacBook Pro. Krieger, now majoring in software engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has continually updated the app, enhancing it to work with all 15" and 17" MacBook Pros that have graphics switching capabilities. Quickly switch between integrated, discrete, or dynamically switching graphics. Clearly, the tradeoff gives better graphics performance, and apps like 3D compositing, video editing, and even the latest version of Photoshop can all benefit from the extra power. The same test run on the Intel HD4000 turned in a score just over 19 fps. The Retina Macbook Pro's NVIDIA GT 650M scored 35 fps in Cinebench's OpenGL test. Of course, the battery life hit isn't that much below Apple's stated rating, especially considering the difference in performance. 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.
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