Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

I believe I found a solution to the problem described here... Uncheck "Automatic graphics switching" in Energy Saver within System Preferences.

I had intermittent trouble with my 2011 MacBook Pro 15" flickering randomly to a blue screen.  Apple replaced the entire computer for me, and the trouble continued.  Sometimes it happened multiple times per day, then it wouldn't happen for days or weeks.

I found simply by unchecking "Automatic graphics switching" in Energy Saver, the problem has completely gone away.  The only trouble is, my battery life is probably half what it should be, and I've had to replace the battery prematurely.

Apple should offer either a fix for this issue, or in my case, they should have at least "comped" the new battery.  I've never had more than a few hours battery life in my MacBook Pro because to prevent the screen flickering to blue, I have to leave it in the higher-energy default mode, without graphics switching.

Can anyone else confirm on this list if this solves the issue for you?

- Jeff

This actually makes my computer crash. It will probably for you too when/if the problem gets worse for your laptop.

This options makes your computer use only the more powerfull discrete GPU, hence the lower battery life.

The first symptom seems to happen with the graphic switching, utimately the discrete GPU always fail.

I too emailed Tim Cook, twice! No response yet, and I'm not expecting one.

Most people suffering from these issues have completely unusable MacBooks. Mine simply boot to the blue screen with thin black vertical lines. You may have luck with your method now, but trust me, this I the beginning of the end. Soon enough you'll have a completely unusable machine too. Only thing thing that works for me was deleting the discrete graphics drivers, but then I have a very sluggish machine which is worse than my 2006 Mac.

Same issue. Mid 2011 MacBook Pro, AMD6490.... I hope a sollution is found soon. My Mac is completely dead. It does not pass beyond the gray screen no matter what!

And it is STILL better than a PC....

This won't work for long.

That was discussed I think on page 2.

Your problem will return.

My MacBook Pro did the same thing about a month ago. It went to blue screen, then I restarted. Upon restart it showed me my login. I attempted to login, but it was frozen. I restarted a second time, and I went to white screen. That was it. In order to not lose data, my son pulled the hard drive and backed it up...so it was fairly apparent that it was not a hard drive crash. Took it to the Apple Genius bar and they confirmed...it was the graphics card.

They sent it into Apple with the flat fee program, $315 for the repair. They replaced the graphics card and the logic board and it has operated well since that time.

How can we push for an Apple Replacement program (graphics card) on this defect as they instituted for the 2011 27" iMac? I would like to get this refunded, based upon the reoccurrence of this issue as shared by so many others.

Same problem here...

Did never had an issue with flickering blue when shifting between graphic cards. Using gfxCardStatus kind of works for me. Sometimes it will hang though when setting it to discreete only.

I think the most interesting thing is that so many have this issue now. What have changed?

I dont want to spend anything on swapping out the mainboard as its coming to an end of the life cycle and I plan to buy a new one after the summer, so hope Apple can come out with some solution.

I followed the instructions in http://www.asyncro.com/2013/12/12/macbook-pro-discreate-graphics-card-issue-fix/ which are to move the AMD drivers away from the Library and rebuild the kext cache without them.

It became slow as molasses and cannot enter sleep mode, but it can boot for the first time in 3 weeks and I'm now able to get all my stuff out to another computer.

buzzart wrote:

 

The solution provided by Davide Pasca will remove the drivers for the problematic AMD descrete graphics card. This will mean the system will not attempt to use the GPU and will instead default to using the integrated graphics.

 

          mv /System/Library/Extensions/AMD* ~/Desktop/

 

That will move all extensions (drivers) with a file name starting with "AMD" to the desktop.

 

IMHO This should only be done as a last resort if gfxCardStatus is not working for you ie. MBP crashes before gfxCardStatus can do its thing. Unfortunately that is the case for many people - like me.

 

It seems that most versions of OSX without these drivers will perform very poorly - sluggish rendering seems to be the main complaint. According to reports I've read this sluggish rendering make the computer unusable for real work.

 

And once you've removed the drivers they can be tricky to reinstall if you want to because permissions on the drivers need to be corrected once you move them back into the Extensions directory. Not a problem if you're familiar with *nix permissions and the CLI.

 

On my install of OSX Lion these drivers all start with "ATI" rather than "AMD" so the command to move them is:

 

          mv /System/Library/Extensions/ATI* ~/Desktop/

 

On my install of Lion with the ATI driver removed I have a very stable and usable system now. It doesn't crash but the dGPU is not available so the graphics are not as good as they could be in certain applications (many games, Photoshop etc). But the rendering does NOT feel sluggish as some people have reported. If I start up in Safe mode then I encounter the sluggish rendering issues. I suspect that in Safe mode even the integrated graphics drivers are disabled.

 

I'm not planning to upgrade the OS beyond Lion because I suspect that removing the AMD drivers in future versions of the OS also causes the integrated graphics drivers to be disabled and this causes the sluggish graphics.

 

I'd be interested to hear from anyone that is running a more recent OS and has successfully removed the AMD drivers and still has good rendering performance.

 

I'm still waiting for Apple to address this issue - either a recall or a replacement logic board which will not fail again.

Thanks for the follow up buzzart - here's to hoping this works on my machine (which is running Mavericks). 

Will report back shortly...

Ok, ran the command in single-user command line...

After entering " mount -uw / " , the screen actually went fuzzy/squiggly (like during bad reboots with the horizontal lines), but I was able to enter the next two lines and shutdown.

On reboot, the screen was bluish and had the squiggly lines (which always means I'll get a gray screen after entering FileVault password). After rebooting from the gray screen, I was able to get through login and am now on the desktop.

How do I know if I'm only running integrated graphics (without explicitly using gfxcardstatus to force the switch)?

You can go to "About This Mac" under the Apple menu. Then hit the "More Info…" button. And it should show you which graphics chip is currently being used.

Add yet one more failing MBP user to the list.  Thanks for all that have posted before with attempts to solve this problem. 

'Have an appointment at the Apple Store on Monday to see what they have to say about my (formerly very useful) machine.

Will-NY wrote:

 

Ok, ran the command in single-user command line...

 

After entering " mount -uw / " , the screen actually went fuzzy/squiggly (like during bad reboots with the horizontal lines), but I was able to enter the next two lines and shutdown.

 

On reboot, the screen was bluish and had the squiggly lines (which always means I'll get a gray screen after entering FileVault password). After rebooting from the gray screen, I was able to get through login and am now on the desktop.

How do I know if I'm only running integrated graphics (without explicitly using gfxcardstatus to force the switch)?

**Update... it appears that the using /AMD* instead of /ATI* didn't work. There's no folder on the desktop and when I opened Firefox, gfxcardstatus (which autoruns at startup) switched from 'dynamic' to 'discrete'.

Should I try again using ATI?

Also, am I correct to hit RETURN after each line of code?

mount -uw / ##hit return, wait for command to run

mv /System/Library/Extensions/ATI* ~/Desktop/ ##hit return, wait for command to run

shutdown -h now ##hit return, computer shutsdown