ZBrushCentral

ZBrush 4's strange behavior on os x, macbook pro

Hello,

Here’s what I noticed. On my i7 macbook pro there are “two” graphic cards, Intel HD Graphics chip and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M. and an automatic way to switch between them. Something similar to nVidia’s Optimus technology.

Optimus detects its necessity based on a cloud-stored whitelist of apps that NVIDIA has, which could potentially become out of date or at least have difficulty in keeping up with app releases (though users get the flexibility of manually enabling apps). Meanwhile, Apple’s solution is based on deeper OS-level stuff, with OS X figuring out what sorts of technologies an app is going to call on (like OpenGL, for instance) and turning on the GPU accordingly.

What I noticed is that when only ZBrush is running, by default Intel’s chip is the activated one, not nVidia.
Also, when nVidia is activated, and ZBrush is running, it’s not on the list of dependencies.

Is it possible that ZB doesn’t use any advanced graphic features? Or it’s a problem with apple’s implementation of the idea.

It’s easy to turn on nVidia manually. Specially with this little tool.

Still, it makes me curious :smiley:

Is it possible that ZB doesn’t use any advanced graphic features

Correct

Crazy. I believe you, but in the same time cannot believe that there isn’t a single thing that would trigger the nVidia activation. As I said it’s easy to switch graphics manually. But since there’s no ZB on dependencies list guess the only benefit is that nVida doesn’t share system memory but uses it’s own, so there will be more for ZB to use.

:o