kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 9, 2014, at 5:30 AM, Ian Woloschin <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This might be unrelated, but on most recent Macbook Pros there are two video cards, the Intel integrated GPU and a discrete, more powerful but more power hungry GPU.  Usually you'll run on the lower power Intel GPU, unless an application (or external monitor) requires the discrete GPU to turn on.  Currently, OpenGL mode in PCBNew requires the discrete card to turn on, but I'm curious if that's actually necessary.  If it works with just the integrated GPU you could still use hardware rendering, assuming it has the required OpenGL extensions (which I think it does?).
> 
> I'm not certain how this works, but it requires the use of an Info.plist file in the app bundle directory.  See: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/qa/qa1734/_index.html
> 
> I might try to play around with this a little bit myself, but I'm not really sure how to get the Info.plist file to even be recognized, so it might take a while.

Interesting article! (I'm typing this on the last of the 17" MacBook Pros, too, so I am very interested in this.)

I believe the Info.plist file is the one in /Applications/kicad/pcbnew/Contents/Info.plist and it's easily modified by hand with a text editor or Xcode. (Right-click on the application icon and choose "Show Package Contents" so the bundle's contents show up in the Finder. Or do it from the terminal.)

I wonder how you can tell if the computer has switched to the discrete GPU. I can guess: it starts heating up and the fan starts spinning fast!

-a