Macbook Retina integrated graphics

[KurroZaki]

Hi guys

I have been using vlc for a long time on windows and have recently bought a macbook retina (My first mac and its amazing).
However when starting VLC on my macbook it instantly switches to the dedicated graphics card, even when not playing anything
or when just playing audio. This is pretty bad for battery life because the integrated intel HD4000 graphics should really be enough
to handle almost any video playback you throw at it and audio certainly doesn't required a graphics card.
I have tried to force my macbook to stay on integrated graphics but then playback starts stuttering a lot (I was playing a 1080p MKV file with subtitles).
I think vlc has a bug in how it handles integrated HD4000 graphics (I'm not sure about that though).

[fkuehne]

Regrettably, VLC cannot decide which graphics card to use on your MacBook. This is done by the OS. Since VLC uses an OpenGL texture for video rendering, the OS probably thinks that the dedicated card is needed. As you can see by slow performance when enforcing the integrated graphics, it doesn't seem to be wrong about this.

[KurroZaki]

I do think that the intel HD4000 graphics should really be capable of 1080p playback. Definitely when you consider that my pc can play 1080p just fine and has a GT520 graphics card that gets beaten by the intel HD4000 in pretty much any benchmark (and mostly by a nice margin).
The problem also occurs when no video at all is playing. Just opening up VLC is enough to trigger the dedicated graphics and that is a problem on OS X because fully quitting something is cumbersome and often forgotten. The only thing that keeps me from forgetting it is that I get notifications about what graphics is being used.

[fkuehne]

Hey,

I just checked back with Apple's Developer Forum. According to them (users, not Apple themselves), you described behavior is normal and to be expected since VLC uses OpenGL for rendering. As soon as any app makes use of OpenGL, the OS switches the graphics card.
I'll file a bug report on this at Apple to ask for an API to prevent this, but I doubt that they are going to fix this any time soon.

Still thanks for your report!

[fkuehne]

Another update: there might be a solution for this on OS X Lion and later. We're testing it internally at the moment.