Photos app uses discrete graphics

[gigapocket1]

Anyone else 2018 Macbook Pros use discrete graphics in weird apps. As soon as I open photos. it switches to discrete.. which I feel shouldn't need it.
Gfxcardstatus doesn't work really well with forcing the use of a particular graphics card

 

[leman]

Anyone else 2018 Macbook Pros use discrete graphics in weird apps. As soon as I open photos. it switches to discrete.. which I feel shouldn't need it.

Yes, it does since it uses the GPU quite extensively (for both smooth display of large quantity of pictures and for image classification) . I am sure that Apple can improve this though to only engage the dGPU when really needed, but that would most likely require a non-trivial change to macOS.

 

[gigapocket1]

Yes, it does since it uses the GPU quite extensively (for both smooth display of large quantity of pictures and for image classification) . I am sure that Apple can improve this though to only engage the dGPU when really needed, but that would most likely require a non-trivial change to macOS.

Yeah... it’s just when on battery. I feel like I don’t need the Vega 20 just to run that app.. not when other laptops with only 1 weaker card can run the app

 

[leman]

Yeah... it’s just when on battery. I feel like I don’t need the Vega 20 just to run that app.. not when other laptops with only 1 weaker card can run the app

Unfortunately, this is a current limitation of how GPU switching works. I recommend that you give feedback to Apple so that they have more pressure to change this in future releases. In the meantime,I am afraid that the solution is to close the app when you are not using it.

 

[cynics]

Has anyone actually calculated the overall efficiency difference?

Depending on the task the dedicated GPU can (possibly) be more efficient (2x the power 3x the speed sort of thing). The photos app not only needs to decode HEVC and HEIF but needs to transcode to compatible formats when sharing. While the CPU can handle this I think utilizing the GPU would be advantageous.

But even photos, especially high res with wider color depths can have a performance benefit from GPU acceleration.

I don't know that anything above is fact but its something to consider.