After I updated to OSX Lion on my Macbook Pro (Mid 2010), I noticed that the Battery life has been significantly reduced. No more 5+ hours of Battery life rather it shows 2 to 3 hours of less. However, it was found to be lower than that when you actually started to use the MBP on battery. I checked and found that nothing specific is running that is taking extra resources. After some digging through the console system logs, I noticed that Lion is always using high end NVIDIA GeForce graphics card rather than the internal Intel HD Graphics! This is happening despite "Automatic graphics switching" is enabled!
How to Identify which Graphics card Lion is using:
1. Run Terminal. Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.
2. type system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType | grep 'GeForce' -A 20 | grep Online
3. Lion is using GeForce card if the output is, Online: Yes
If you find that Lion is always using the power hungry GeForce then obviously you have an issue unless your "automatic graphics switching" is disabled in "Energy Saver Pref"
Solution:
There is nifty tool called gfxCardStatus that can show and change the video card. Download from codykrieger.com and install. It remains in the Menu bar and allows you to change Video card.
How to Identify which Graphics card Lion is using:
1. Run Terminal. Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.
2. type system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType | grep 'GeForce' -A 20 | grep Online
3. Lion is using GeForce card if the output is, Online: Yes
If you find that Lion is always using the power hungry GeForce then obviously you have an issue unless your "automatic graphics switching" is disabled in "Energy Saver Pref"
Solution:
There is nifty tool called gfxCardStatus that can show and change the video card. Download from codykrieger.com and install. It remains in the Menu bar and allows you to change Video card.
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