How-to: Switch between graphics cards on the new MacBook Pro
Posted on October 15th, 2008 by Brad
Apple just announced a refresh of their MacBook and MacBook Pro line. One of the coolest features is that the MacBook Pro now has 2 video cards. Both made by nVidia instead of Intel, one is an “integrated” chip that shares it’s memory with your system memory and the other is a “discrete” chip that has it’s own 256M or 512M dedicated memory. Everywhere I’ve read about this feature so far has said that you can “switch” between the two depending on your needs. But how? What do they mean exactly? There are no physical switches on the outside of the case. So is it a software switch or is the switch automatic depending on what you’re doing at the time. Well, I dug around on the support page and found this article that describes how:
The MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2008) includes a new feature in the Energy Saver system preference pane for adjusting graphics performance. You can select Better battery life or Higher performance, as shown below.
- Select Better battery life for situations where heavy, graphic-intensive applications are not being used or use of the MagSafe adaptor is limited.
- Select Higher performance if playing games or carrying out other tasks which involve heavy graphics processing.
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I’m kind of on the other end of this argument. I think that it does suck and they should have gone the extra mile to make it easier to switch. I hate getting into system preferences for anything, but every time that I want to conserve battery life or play a game I have to navigate to the above screen? No thanks. MAYBE someone will make a nice app to be placed in the menu bar, much the way that the wireless settings are. Maybe it could be incorporated like iStat as a 3rd party app?
I could imagine that most of the time I would have mine switched to the integrated card, but I’m not much of a gamer either. I think most people will use the switch as much as I will, they’ll use one card or the other and NOT use the switch.
~Jon
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7 Responses to “How-to: Switch between graphics cards on the new MacBook Pro”
1Jonathan
October 21st, 2008 @ 12:15 pm
It would be a pain to have to go through that trouble just to switch between cards, but it’s cool that there’s even an option. Surely it won’t be too long before someone (or even Apple) comes up with a little utility to create a key combination to switch cards? Maybe Apple would put in a ‘hard’ switch somewhere on the laptop to switch between them? That just seems way too inconvenient.
2Brad
October 21st, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
As usual, thanks for the comment Jonathan. I doubt Apple would add a physical switch anywhere on the laptop. Apple is really touting it’s fancy new carved-from-an-aluminum-brick cases and adding a switch would mean some re-tooling plus I’m sure Lord Steve Jobs would deem it “fugly”. It’s basically already a software switch, it’s just in System Preferences which isn’t convenient so I’m sure an Automator task or an AppleScript would do the trick. It’s the logout/login crap that would be hard to automate. Not sure about that though… There are ways to restart Finder without having to log out and then back in again so it may just be possible to simplify.
3ricky
June 13th, 2009 @ 12:27 am
@ Brad, carved from a solid brick means that by and large there is no tooling, so no REtooling, but yeah with so many other ways to switch between, can’t imagine a dedicated button
4Brad
June 13th, 2009 @ 9:34 pm
Ricky, I actually ended up buying a 15 inch MacBook Pro the month after I originally wrote this post. There definitely is not a dedicated button, it is in fact software like the screenshot above shows. Also, turns out it’s pretty rare that I switch into “performance” mode but I will say that it is very nice having the option and helps out a lot when needed. Thanks for the comment man.
5Marco
June 24th, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
My two cents… the easier way is to click on the power icon in the top right corner and open Energy Saver Preferences. It’s a bit faster. The 9600 rocks!!
6jay
January 7th, 2010 @ 12:50 pm
Is there a way to make the MBP switch from battery saving 9400 to the higher performance 9600 when I connect the MBP to the power supply?
That should be automatic. In fact, it should come from the factory set that way. (9600 on AC, 9400 on DC).
7Brad
January 7th, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
@jay – There is no way (that I’m aware of) to do this automatically. And to be honest, I personally would not want it to automatically switch cards when I plug the power adapter in because a lot of times I’ll have the laptop actually on my lap and when it’s using the 9600 card it runs considerably warmer. I would like an easier way to switch the cards though and I also have not found a way to do that either other than what Marco described in his comment above. You’re still going into Preferences, but at least that way takes you directly to where you need to be in Preferences. I should also reiterate that I rarely switch to the 9600 card. For the most part I find the 9400 to be sufficient, but that’s just me. I don’t play a lot of games or do too much with graphics. Now, when I do fire up Adobe Illustrator or something, I’ll switch cards first because things do run smoother.
Sorry man, not a way to do it that I’m aware of.
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