applicationsmac-appstoremacbook pro
I was trying out the Magic Window timelapse wallpaper app and noticed that GfxCardStatus changed to discrete as soon as I loaded the application. It consumes 79.7mb of real memory. Does this mean there is a big impact on battery life ? How can I know for sure ?
rMBP Mountain Lion OSX 10.8
No.
To start at the beginning, Mac OS X loads certain kernel extensions very early in the boot process. And, intrinsically, kernel extensions will only function if they are loaded at the start of the boot process.
The purpose of Safe Mode is to boot the computer without these kernel extensions.
In Normal mode, these kernel extensions are permitted to load right at the beginning of the boot.
So, by definition, the only way to have Normal mode is to load all the kernel extensions at boot time. Hence, if you are in Safe Mode, you must reboot to create Normal Mode.
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Best Answer
Yes, I'm afraid it will have an impact, but not necessarily a big one. I'm in a similar situation, a seemingly-benign app (Postbox, a mail client of all things) forces my discrete graphics on too (same model, MBP Retina).
The authors are fully aware of it but say there's nothing they can do - ultimately the choice about whether to enable discrete graphics is up to Apple, it gets turned on automatically if OSX detects that heavy graphics processing is taking place.
Apparently in the case of Postbox it's due to font rendering or something. I've just learnt to live with it - if I was really desperate I can force it back to onboard graphics using the very tool you mention anyway.
How big the effect is really depends on what the application is doing, and only you can determine it, by trying it with graphics first on discrete and observing estimated battery remaining, then again on integrated graphics. This should be a reasonable clue.