GfxCardStatus works fine with Mac OS X 10.7 or later. Gfxcardstatus-2.3.zip and gfxCardStatus-1.7.5.zip are the most frequent filenames for this application's installer. The software relates to System Tools. The most popular versions among gfxCardStatus for Mac users are 2.3 and 1.7. This free Mac app is an intellectual property of Cody Krieger. GfxCardStatus is an unobtrusive menu bar app for OS X that allows MacBook Pro users to see which apps are affecting their battery life by using the more power-hungry graphics. GfxCardStatus is an unobtrusive menu bar app for OS X that allows MacBook Pro users to see which apps are affecting their battery life by using the more power-hungry graphics. GfxCardStatus allows you to choose the which chipset you want to remain active so that you can extend battery life and maximize power manually. GfxCardStatus places a small icon in the menu bar and displays a small n for nVidia or i for the currently active Intel graphics chip set. Just use your mouse to switch manually between the two when needed. GfxCardStatus is a really handy way to keep tabs on what your Mac is doing automatically. I prefer to keep it set to the Dynamic Switching algorithm and only when I’m trying to conserve battery life, force my Mac to use integrated graphics. If you’re experiencing bad battery life on your Mac, check out gfxCardStatus.
I am seeing different performance results when running a WinXP SP3 VM inside a Mac OS 10.6.5 host... using VirtualBox 3.2.12... depending on whether I boot the VM using Intel graphics, or nVidia graphics (using a 2010 MBP). In case you're unfamiliar, Apple made these laptops with ability to switch between integrated Intel graphics or the onboard nVidia graphics hardware...I'm not sure if this is a problem with gfxCardStatus v1.8.1 (a small OS X program used to switch between graphics hardwares) or Virtualbox necessarily, but when I boot the VM using Intel graphics, and load up an old game inside WinXP, I get very poor frame rates... around 20fps or so... within that same boot of the VM, if I switch my graphics hardware through the host OS (with gfxCardStatus) to nVidia, I still see poor results... low frame rates around the same speed...
However, if I boot the XP VM with nVidia graphics, I get excellent performance under nVidia hardware (game framerate is >100)... switching to Intel graphics makes performance drop (framerates around 30~40)... under this scenario (booted with nVidia), the VM behaves how I would expect... it is able to make use of the hardware switch... switching back and forth between nVidia and Intel gives repeatable expected results...Gfxcardstatus 1.8.1
So the VM can handle the actual switching events between graphics hardware just fine... but it's like it can't see the nVidia hardware if the guest OS isn't booted with it running...Gfxcardstatus
Gfxcardstatus High Sierra
Any thoughts / ideas?? Perhaps this a bug? Or maybe it's a limitation of WinXP during the boot or something?