[GEM-dev] graphics card switching in OS X and Gem

[Max]

hi list,

out of curiosity why the battery live of a macbook pro is so different sometimes i investigated if the graphics card may be the culprit and i installed this nice tiny tool to tell me when which of the two graphics cards is actually used
http://gfx.io/
it turned out that my suspicion was correct and it is quite interesting to see which programs cause to use the ati card (discreet) over the energy savy intel (integrated) one. For instance current Opera is forcing the descreete card, so just leaving Opera on in the background causes the battery to drain even though the processor is idle.

So i tried this for Pd and found that it is not affecting the graphics card switch until the moment you are loading Gem. So if you are patching with Gem loaded even without the window open the discreete card is used.

That's certainly not a really big issue, but i thought it might be interesting enough to share this observation here.
It would be desirable to make Gem only switch the graphics card when rendering to the Gemwin is turned on instead of on loading the library.

I don't know  if that could be an issue on other platforms and hardware as well.

max