Absolutely ! http://codekrieger.com/gfxCardStatus allows you to lock your graphics card to use only the Intel integrated graphics. It makes a big difference when you need to squeeze every last hour out your battery.
The other thing that helps if you have a ton of startup items for everyday use is to hold down shift when you log in, so there are not extraneous processed running in the background.
And also keep the screen brightness at the minimum acceptable level.
This way I can get 9 hours out of my 17 macbook.
Does that memory act as the "VRAM" that Final Cut Pro needs?
The integrated Intel Iris graphics chips contain onboard memory that act as L4 cache this helps speed up access to the shared system RAM, but doesn't replace it as the backing store for graphics data.
Does this mean that the discrete graphics card has 256MB on its own, but can also receive more from the system memory, a la the integrated cards?
The discrete card has its own RAM, placed near to the GPU and connected to the GPU with a private buss. Additional RAM from the system memory cannot be used with discrete cards. Really, you wouldn't want to -- it would slow down its processing capabilities.
Lastly, how different would the performance be for Final Cut Pro (or similar apps) between the Iris Pro graphics and the discrete card? If someone wants to use Final Cut Pro, is the discrete card a necessity?
This is hard to answer definitely. It depends on what a user is trying to do in Final Cut Pro. Certainly the discrete should out perform the integrated graphics setup when the workload starts to turn more demanding but OpenCL performance is proving to be almost on par for the integrated cards with the discrete cards in the latest Retina MacBook Pros.
Here is an article that has some discrete vs. integrated FCP benchmarking information in it. It points to this other article that has a choice quote in it:
In the past we sneered at the integrated GPUs and their puny performance. Not any more. The Intel Iris and Iris Pro are every bit the match or master of discrete NVIDIA Mobile GPUs -- at least when it comes to OpenCL acceleration.
Where the discrete cards win is in OpenGL-based workloads.
Ideally you'd run your own benchmarks on the hardware with representative workloads. If this isn't feasible, you're stuck relying on the benchmarks done by others like those two sites above to make your decisions.
Best Answer
The NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB doesn't contain any dedicated VRAM. Instead a maximum of 256 MB of your 8 GB RAM are used as VRAM (shared memory).
I doubt that you can run apps which require 512 MB or more VRAM. You may try to lower the VRAM requirements of the application though - depending on whether this possible at all. Anyway, it will run incredibly slow then.