DTPO and High Performance Video

I’m trying to optimize my battery life and noticed that DTPO is using the high performance GPU. Is this to be expected while on battery power and when DTPO is idle?

Particulars:
DTPO 2.8.9
OSX El Capitan 10.11.13
MBP 17" Early 2011

I used to run GfxCardStatus:
macupdate.com/app/mac/33905/gfxcardstatus
in the menubar. You can see when your machine switches over to the discrete GPU, and what applications require it. For quite a few of them, it was hard to see the justification. You can use this program to force the machine to only use the Intel graphics system. But there are dangers: A colleague of mine could not get his laptop to project at a conference, because the Intel graphics didn’t provide external video, at least on the 2010-period machines…

Last update for GfxCardStatus is from 2012, no idea how it works under Yosemite and ElCapitan. I no longer care about the issue. To be honest, I never found significant energy savings when I carefully switched back and forth.

Btw.: I don’t think it has to do anything with a certain app idling. It’s about the app calling certain graphic routines. Once that app has done that, I believe there is no turning back until that app has quit.

If this is expected behavior, that’s fine. I just need to remember to close DTPO while not using it and on battery. :smiley: