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Listing of apps which invoke the Nvidia on i5 and i7 MBPs

I and a few others here have been thinking it might be an idea to try to develop a listing of the apps that have been reported as / appear to invoke the NVidia GT330M processor on the MBP.

Rather than making this a thread for arguing about the "pros and cons" of all of this it would be helpful if people could simply list applications which they have found to do so, especially if they are ones that people might not expect to. (There are plenty of other threads where the rights and wrongs are being argued). If necessary, add a comment indicating whether the switch occurs whenever the application is used or only when particular types of use are made of it. If you come across subsequent updates of such programs which change their behaviour and allow them to operate under the Intel Integrated Graphics, or if you find particular apps DON'T provoke this behaviour in your own experience, then perhaps you could post a note about this, too.

I should also note that I am unable to personally "test" any of these, as I don't have access to an i5 or i7 MBP.

A few which have been mentioned as invoking the NVidia elsewhere, in no particular order are:

Tweetie
HyperSpaces
Skype
iWeb
iMovie
GarageBand
Parallels 5 Desktop
Microsoft Office 2004
Microsoft Office AutoUpdate daemon
RapidWeaver
PathFinder
Mathematica
Warp
Droplr
1Password
Clips
NetNewsWire
Koolclip


Cheers

Rod

MBP 13"2.26, MBP15"2.2, iMacG520"RevB , MB2CD, MBCD, ,PM5400/180 & earlier, Mac OS X (10.6.3), 7 chooks, 2 dogs, 2 daughters, 1 pear tree, 0 partridges, itinerant bats, magpie

Posted on Apr 27, 2010 8:45 PM

Reply
78 replies

Apr 30, 2010 5:00 PM in response to lhotka

There is no mystery - this is half-baked "intelligent" switching. Look at the list of applications above! Why should we *have to care* what invokes nVidia? Apple need to stop thinking that they know best and empower their users with control over which GPU is used. Or they can change their marketing copy and battery life claims.

Listing of apps which invoke the Nvidia on i5 and i7 MBPs

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