©2015 - 2022 Chad’s Technoworks. Disclaimer and Terms of Use

Chad’s TechnoWorks My Journal On Technology

Information Technology

HOW TO ENABLE PERMANENT DISCRETE GRAPHICS IN MAC OS X

The Macbook Pro laptops comes either just the integrated graphics or dual graphics (having both integrated and discrete graphics card support).


As of this writing, the current integrated graphics circuit supported by the Macbook lineup are either made by nVidia or Intel HD series. This Integrated Graphics Circuit is ideal for a less intensive graphical application such as productivity softwares (Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc.) It uses a portion of your existing RAM as its buffer for graphical output. For example, the nVidia Integrated Graphics of a Macbook Pro 2010 reserves 512mb from my RAM of 8gb. Thus, making only 7.5gb RAM available to the system.

Using Integrated Graphics for games and video editing may give you undesirable performances since both the application data and graphical data are being rendered by a single RAM module. Memory access contention occurs in this situation.


Discrete Graphics card is available on some High-end Macbook Pro 15. This is a dedicated graphics circuit that has its own high speed RAM and GPU processor. Majority of the Discrete Graphics found in the Macbook Pro are made by AMD Radeon class. It is capable of sustaining an average of >30 fps of intensive 3D game graphics.


The dual graphics of MacBook Pro is set to automatically switch between the two graphic systems having the Integrated Graphics as its default mode. If the operating system detects some heavy requirement of graphical streaming, it would then switch to Discrete Graphics on-the-fly.

Depending on the application currently running, that switching may cause some problems on the way your apps would render your display. Thus, you would want to disable this auto switching and just use permanently one graphics circuit. There may also be other situations where you you would want to maximize the use of your RAM for your applications. And so, the need to set your Macbook to run only in discrete graphics.


By disabling the Automatic Graphics Switch, makes the Macbook Pro to use only the Discrete Graphics. This is also one way to disable the use of Integrated Graphics.


To do this, go to System Preferences ->  Energy Saver, then uncheck the Automatic Graphic Switching.