New MacBook Pros’ Amazing Battery Life Explained By Automatic GPU Switching

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One of the major improvements of the latest MacBook Pros is in battery life: the 13-inch MacBook Pro is now boasting an impressive ten hour battery life, while even the more power hungry 15 and 17 inchers are promising eight to nine hours of mobile performance.

How’s Apple doing it? Dynamic graphics switching between the workhorse NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and the low-power Intel HD GPUs. MacBook Pros have had the ability to switch between GPUs since last year, but it was a user preference that required a reboot. Now, the MacBook Pro handles the graphics switching automatically, without the user ever having to worry about it.

It’s similar to NVIDIA’s Optimus technology, but unlike Optimus, the new MacBook Pros ‘ dynamic graphics switching tech is even better at power management, because unlike Optimus it never runs both GPUs at once. Need to answer some email, browse the internet, or work on a spreadsheet? The Intel HD GPU is all you need. But if you want to play Bioshock, use Photoshop or watch a high-def movie, the Intel HD will shut down and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M kicks in.

I always felt that the way the dual GPUs were handled in the last MacBook Pros was a pretty lazy implementation on Apple’s part. I’m really glad to see how nice their solution is with the 2010 models.

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