Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Found way to know what GPU is in use!

WiLLGT09 said:
V08yx.png


So, I happened to look in the Power info in System Profiler and noticed that "GPUSwitch" is set to "2" on both AC Power and Battery Power. Now, this info should show the settings I have selected in Energy Saver (i.e. it does show that I have disabled "wake on LAN" for when I'm on AC Power).

Assuming that the "GPUSwitch" setting of 2 means to enable the 330M, as when on AC Power, the 330M should be enabled all the time (correct?). It appears that even when on battery power, the GPU is set to 2, and thus being enabled all the time?

Does this mean that there is some .plist file that can be manipulated with a handy Terminal command to change it to setting of "1" or something that might enable on-the-fly manual switching of the graphics card? I don't know how to go about finding these types of cool Terminal tricks I see all over the place.
Click to expand...

Check pmset im Terminal for something related to GPUSwitch... type: man pmset

I'd check but I don't have a new MBP.

I find it interesting that it's set to "2". That means it might be possible for "1" to mean On The Fly switching and "0" for Intel HD only? I'm completely speculating here...but if something like 'sudo pmset gpuswitch 0' could turn off the 330M completely, we'd be set. There's flags to apply settings for battery power only, too.

Since Apple is only giving us two options in System Preferences, it'd make more sense for there to only be a "0" and "1" for GPUSwitch -- either it's on or it's off (assuming it means what I hope it means.)
 
MBHockey said:
Check pmset im Terminal for something related to GPUSwitch... type: man pmset

I'd check but I don't have a new MBP.

I find it interesting that it's set to "2". That means it might be possible for "1" to mean On The Fly switching and "0" for Intel HD only? I'm completely speculating here...but if something like 'sudo pmset gpuswitch 0' could turn off the 330M completely, we'd be set. There's flags to apply settings for battery power only, too.

Since Apple is only giving us two options in System Preferences, it'd make more sense for there to only be a "0" and "1" for GPUSwitch -- either it's on or it's off (assuming it means what I hope it means.)
Click to expand...

It doesn't look like the man page has been updated to include anything about the gpuswitch... Unless I overlooked it, but I checked twice.

I think that if anything, it being set to 2 is on the fly switching. Right now I am plugged in and on the Intel GPU with Automatic graphics switching enabled.
 
I wonder if the reason that they don't provide an option to use just the Intel HD GPU is because it doesn't support all the tech that Apple is pushing. I've heard that the Intel GPU doesn't support OpenCL and since that's one of the big features of Snow Leopard it makes sense that Apple wouldn't want to possibly cut people out of using it by giving them an option that would disable such functionality. Does that make sense?
 
WisdomWolf said:
I wonder if the reason that they don't provide an option to use just the Intel HD GPU is because it doesn't support all the tech that Apple is pushing. I've heard that the Intel GPU doesn't support OpenCL and since that's one of the big features of Snow Leopard it makes sense that Apple wouldn't want to possibly cut people out of using it by giving them an option that would disable such functionality. Does that make sense?
Click to expand...
That's what I'm worried about. It's all well and good implementing GPU switching and claiming you can get up to another hour out of the battery from it, but not if a large portion of 2D applications are switching over to the nVidia graphics when they shouldn't really need it, keeping the 330M running until you quit them rather than dynamically switching back and forth when they're inactive in the background/hidden.

Hopefully it's something that an update or two will sort out, or at least something that application developers will be able to specify to stop activating the 330M unnecessarily.
 
andrewfee said:
That's what I'm worried about. It's all well and good implementing GPU switching and claiming you can get up to another hour out of the battery from it, but not if a large portion of 2D applications are switching over to the nVidia graphics when they shouldn't really need it, keeping the 330M running until you quit them rather than dynamically switching back and forth when they're inactive in the background/hidden.

Hopefully it's something that an update or two will sort out, or at least something that application developers will be able to specify to stop activating the 330M unnecessarily.
Click to expand...

well this problem really sucks.. apple is not likely to have a software solution soon that will make the auto switching better because it calls on the OS level core functions and is not something that can be changed overnight.. it will involve major graphics driver reprogramming.

however i do think they will come out with a manual override firmware update that allows for manual software control of which gpu is being used.. this is the less than ideal solution but anything is better than what it is right now..

the reason manual switching is terrible is because lets say you use intel gpu 90% of time to save battery.. you're using a gpu that's worse than last generation's 9400m graphics.. think about that..

the other 10% you're using 330m for the power.. but you're draining battery because it's always on!!

lose lose situation for manual switching..

ideally.. the gpu should switch over on load measurements of the intel gpu and switch back as soon as load drops such as when you minimize photoshop.. NOT when a OS level core function is called.. that's just stupid implementation..

good luck early adopters .. always get shafted
 
I'd just like to point out that this thread has solidified my choice to get a 13" MBP this time around. I'll take a decent IGP that supports all the fancy tech (albeit slower) AND give good battery life without all this headache.
 
Here is one theory as to why they won't let you force the intel GPU- what if they only wrote an incomplete driver for the Intel GPU and it physically can't run all of their APIs. If they let you turn off the discrete GPU, those parts of the program that used to call for a discrete GPU might just crash.

If this is true, they would need to finish that driver before they could fully "enable" the Intel GPU, which may not be a small task. I'm hopeful they come through with this, but not going to lose sleep waiting for it.

Another program that always uses the discrete but would rarely need it: MATLAB 2009a.
 
chopper dave said:
Here is one theory as to why they won't let you force the intel GPU- what if they only wrote an incomplete driver for the Intel GPU and it physically can't run all of their APIs. If they let you turn off the discrete GPU, those parts of the program that used to call for a discrete GPU might just crash.

If this is true, they would need to finish that driver before they could fully "enable" the Intel GPU, which may not be a small task. I'm hopeful they come through with this, but not going to lose sleep waiting for it.

Another program that always uses the discrete but would rarely need it: MATLAB 2009a.
Click to expand...

more like the intel gpu does not support all snow leopard api at the hardware level.. not something a driver can fix.. open cl? no way jose on intel gpu
 
So, I just downloaded the MacBook Pro Software Update 1.3 from here http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1026 (I can remember if after doing my initial Software Update after booting my Mac the first time today).

Installed, restarted, and I'm still running on the 330M. Ugh.
 
I found what I was causing it for me.

Cloud App and/or Droplr (and Tweetie of course).

I quit every app and started opening my normal array of apps. Process of elimination came down to Cloud App and Droplr, which are small clipboard url sharing apps that reside in the menu bar. I'm not sure what these apps use to invoke the discrete graphics card.

I am relieved a bit, as this is the first time I've seen my Intel HD graphics in use. For some reason, these apps seemed so small that surely, I thought, these couldn't be triggering the 330M.

Hmm. odd.
 
This is mere speculation, but based on common power saving theory.

If the Intel HD is not using its accelerating hardware fully (i.e. incompletely implemented or developed drivers) or do not have this functionality at all, it uses software emulation on OS X. This would lead to more strain on the CPU and use more battery as the higher usage put the CPU in a higher P-State, and fewer C-State down-transitions. In theses cases it would be sensible to use the discreet gfx as it is not CPU demanding. So the actual battery saving might not be there when using the intel gfx only.

Remember as well that the discreet nvidia, does have power saving features, so low usage will not harm battery in the same degree as high usage. In the same way will high usage on the Intel HD drain more power, and maybe some features are so demanding that the battery save is barely noticeable, but the poor GUI response will be.

It should be possible to disable the nvidia gfx when booting using boot arg nv_disable=1 and an interesting experiment would be to run the laptop in this mode with different degrees of graphic intensive applications until the battery drains completely, and to the same with the discreet nvidia only, and see how it affects battery time.

In all cases this is the first version of the drivers, and I am sure later versions will improve the switching as I am sure the license issue between nvidia and intel is not going to be solved anytime soon, and require apple to use this feature in many more systems to come.
 
So I'm not sure if this GPU related, but my battery is only showing up with around 2:15 left on 72%. That seems kind of low, and that I should be getting 3-4 with that percentage. I checked to see if the 330m was on and it was off, nothing was running. Thought the culprit was Cinch, which did activate the discrete GPU, but have turned it off. Checked system profiler to see if 330m was off and it is as of right now, but still seeing a low remaining battery time.

Any ideas?
 
atcorporate said:
So I'm not sure if this GPU related, but my battery is only showing up with around 2:15 left on 72%. That seems kind of low, and that I should be getting 3-4 with that percentage. I checked to see if the 330m was on and it was off, nothing was running. Thought the culprit was Cinch, which did activate the discrete GPU, but have turned it off. Checked system profiler to see if 330m was off and it is as of right now, but still seeing a low remaining battery time.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Have you calibrated the battery? What's the brightness level of the display? I've found on older Macs that I needed to keep the display at almost the lowest brightness to achieve the stated battery life expectations. I just got my MBP today, so I've haven't had much experience with battery life.
 
silversx said:
well this problem really sucks.. apple is not likely to have a software solution soon that will make the auto switching better because it calls on the OS level core functions and is not something that can be changed overnight.. it will involve major graphics driver reprogramming.

however i do think they will come out with a manual override firmware update that allows for manual software control of which gpu is being used.. this is the less than ideal solution but anything is better than what it is right now..

the reason manual switching is terrible is because lets say you use intel gpu 90% of time to save battery.. you're using a gpu that's worse than last generation's 9400m graphics.. think about that..

the other 10% you're using 330m for the power.. but you're draining battery because it's always on!!

lose lose situation for manual switching..

ideally.. the gpu should switch over on load measurements of the intel gpu and switch back as soon as load drops such as when you minimize photoshop.. NOT when a OS level core function is called.. that's just stupid implementation..

good luck early adopters .. always get shafted
Click to expand...
I certainly don't want manual switching, but it would be better than an automatic solution if it's using the 330M instead of the Intel HD graphics unnecessarily. Frankly I don't care about how fast or slow the Intel graphics are compared to anything else as long as it doesn't actually affect performance. It is a shame that Intel have held back the performance of the current MBP range so much by not allowing a dual nVidia GPU solution or USB3. I'm quite sure that the Intel graphics could cope with most 2D demands though, such as those placed on it by a Twitter application.

Things like OpenCL I can understand - that's using the GPU for compute tasks, right? (CUDA equivalent) In that case you want the 330M to kick in.

But surely the Intel HD graphics will support things like CoreImage and CoreAnimation? People are saying it's switching to the 330M for video playback (and then not switching back until the browser is closed) when the Intel graphics are certainly capable of doing that. It supports hardware acceleration for AVC/H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1. (though I suppose we won't see support for WMV/VC-1 in Flip4Mac or Silverlight if Apple aren't letting Adobe accelerate flash) Considering it can handle Blu-ray playback which is much more taxing than any downloaded video, there's definitely no need to use the 330M. Perhaps 'chopper dave' is right about them not having full driver support for the Intel graphics yet.

Even when it does switch to the 330M for good reasons, I think most of us were expecting dynamic switching similar to what Optimus offers without having to quit applications: http://vimeo.com/9315976. That I find very disappointing.
 
WiLLGT09 said:
Have you calibrated the battery? What's the brightness level of the display? I've found on older Macs that I needed to keep the display at almost the lowest brightness to achieve the stated battery life expectations. I just got my MBP today, so I've haven't had much experience with battery life.
Click to expand...

I'm going to calibrate it tonight. I just got it a couple days ago so maybe I should've done this when I first opened it!

I had it at 50% brightness and bluetooth off, airport on, but no heavy activity.

edit: also want add that when it was at 75% it said 3:34 and then I left it idle for a minute and it dropped to 2:15. Never had this problem with my older MBP. I can't tell if it's software or hardware related, sigh.
 
Same problem here with my new MBP 15" 2.4GHz i5.

In addition to tweetie I think that Coversutra seems to activate the discreet graphics. The strange part is that it doesn't activate it immediately when opened, but rather after a little while of activity. When closing down Coversutra it goes back to Intel though.
 
Setting it to different values (0, 1, 2, 3...) has no effect on the GPU Switching of my 2010 i7 MBP. I tried logging out and in after changes, and with "automatic switching" checked and unchecked (this does NOT override this value).

Note also that this value is specific to a power state (battery, AC) while the "automatic switching" box is global.

Also, `gpuswitch' was around before these MBPs. No idea what it actually does.
 
So... how do those Mac Pro guys with multiple graphics cards switch between them? Or is this an eminently silly question?
 
silversx said:
more like the intel gpu does not support all snow leopard api at the hardware level.. not something a driver can fix.. open cl? no way jose on intel gpu
Click to expand...

Are you a hardware engineer that actually knows this, or are you just speculating? I'm not really talking about opencl, just some of the basic APIs that snow leopard uses to accelerate 2d graphics.

Matlab is likely on the list because it *can* use opengl to accelerate simple 2d and 3d graphs. Every GPU since 1995 can do this.
 
I also just noticed that gmail.com forces my computer over to the 330M... I have 6 tabs open right now and am using the Intel GPU, as soon as I go to gmail.com in any of those tabs, on goes the 330M.

Thats just ridiculous...
 
hockey9999 said:
I also just noticed that gmail.com forces my computer over to the 330M... I have 6 tabs open right now and am using the Intel GPU, as soon as I go to gmail.com in any of those tabs, on goes the 330M.

Thats just ridiculous...
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure it's Gmail causing this, not your browser :rolleyes:
 
Which browser are you using, and which browser plugins? Both Safari and Firefox stay with Intel when I open my gmail on my MBP.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back