I sometimes run emulators and have noticed that while running Dolphin or OpenEmu that my MacBook says it's running the program via integrated graphics. gfxCardStatus and activity monitor both say nothing is using the discrete card.
That said... they're wrong. I always thought it was weird that my CPU and iGPU could kick my fans up so high so I had a look in iStat Menus and sure enough, my 5500m was pulling 50W~! Dumbfounded, I fired up the GPU history graph while playing and clearly saw significant activity on both the iGPU and 5500m at the same time.
After this I threw on every app I had on this thing out of curiosity and confirmed that this ONLY HAPPENS with OpenEmu and Dolphin. Everything else behaves and reports GPU usage as it should.
How is it possible that an app is using both the iGPU and discrete card simultaneously? Why does my MacBook say it's not using the discrete card in activity monitor when it is?
Any insight would be welcome!
That said... they're wrong. I always thought it was weird that my CPU and iGPU could kick my fans up so high so I had a look in iStat Menus and sure enough, my 5500m was pulling 50W~! Dumbfounded, I fired up the GPU history graph while playing and clearly saw significant activity on both the iGPU and 5500m at the same time.
After this I threw on every app I had on this thing out of curiosity and confirmed that this ONLY HAPPENS with OpenEmu and Dolphin. Everything else behaves and reports GPU usage as it should.
How is it possible that an app is using both the iGPU and discrete card simultaneously? Why does my MacBook say it's not using the discrete card in activity monitor when it is?
Any insight would be welcome!