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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

May 1, 2010 8:39 AM in response to john_apple__

I went back and checked after reading your post and it was definitely triggering whenever I opened up Evernote for me. Have now discovered it is dependant on the view you use for displaying your notes. If I start up the app in list view, it sticks with Intel. Switch to thumbnail view and it triggers Nvidia!

Not that that info is of any use to anyone, but I really do wonder how they are going to get around things like this!

May 2, 2010 2:56 PM in response to Shakenbake88

I was also getting the Nvidia triggered by the Google Talk applet within Gmail and iGoogle. I traced it to the Google Voice and Video plugin which obviously triggers the Nvidia when it loads the video talk components.

I found uninstalling the Google Voice and Video plugin stops this from triggering the Nvidia but it will leave you without the ability to use video talk through gtalk. Not a problem for me as I will just use Skype (which of course I will only run when I need it as it too triggers the Nvidia) but at least I can leave Gmail/iGoogle open in the background without the discrete graphics running.

Uninstaller for Google plugin can be found at Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Google/Google Plugin Uninstaller

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

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