title: How to disable Macbook Pro from switching to a high performance graphics card in Cocoa?
body: <p>All 2010 Macbook Pros come with two graphics cards — a low-performance built-in Intel HD one and a high-performance discrete NVIDIA one — and it switches between them on the fly depending on the needs of the running applications.</p>
  
  <p>I have a simple Cocoa application that consists of just a menu bar item with a <code>NSTextField</code> in it. All I do is update the text field with an <code>NSAttributedString</code> from time to time. The trouble is that my application switches my Macbook Pro to use the high-performance NVIDIA card (I used the <a href="http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/">gfxCardStatus</a> tool to confirm this).</p>
  
  <p>What could possibly need the high-performance card? Is there a known list of reasons for the applications to require high-performance graphics card? Is there a way to force the computer to use the discrete graphics card?</p>