Mac – Why the Graphics Card on the MacBook Pro is always on “High perf.” status

It does sound like the graphics card is failing. The garbled display is a symptom of this.

If you only run Windows, any PC graphics card in your Mac Pro will work fine.

What's more, the PC Radeon 58xx and 68xx cards work in OS X too, out of the box.

I would recommend one of Radeon 5850, 5870, 6850 or 6870 if you want Mac compatibility, or any good graphics card within your budget if you only want to game in Windows.

1.) This is a known Apple issue. It's insane that it existed in the first place, and it's worse that it still exists, and effects every dual-GPU Mac I have seen (in the office, at home, friends' laptops, etc). So yes, LOTS of people have this problem.

2.) Use gfxCardStatus to keep it locked in discrete mode, keep restarting Safari, or switch to Chrome. The Webkit nightly build isn't fixed, so I'm not sure when a 'real' solution will come about.

3.) That's very unlikely. As I said in (1), this problem effects all sorts of Macs, most of which do not have CUDA installed at all. It also looks like a problem with the Intel GPUs, not the nVidia ones.

Sorry for the bad news!