Retina Macbook Pro – Framerate issues and a fix

I recently became the proud owner of a new Retina Macbook Pro.  I have replaced my gaming computer, 2 Mac Pros, a Macbook Pro, and a Lenovo T420 all with this beast.

I don’t game much these days but I have possibly on occasion played some World of Warcraft.  Performance even at full resolution was actually pretty stellar on this new machine.

However, the other night I was doing some late night work (an all too often occurrence) and I put the machine down for the night.  A few minutes later there was a howling of fans next to me!  Picking up the scorching hot machine it was in the midst of what seemed to be a kernel-panic induced reboot.

It finally restarted and eventually cooled off.  Everything seemed okay until I found a few minutes for a game a few days later.

I logged into WoW and noticed that my framerate was a whopping 4fps.  I tried everything I could think of offhand to remedy the issue.  Thinking I might be crazy I downloaded a benchmark, CineBench.  This confirmed my suspicions that the computer was likely only running off the integrated graphics chip versus the dedicated card.

So I set out to see what I could do before calling in reinforcements.  First I tried a NVRAM as shown here.  This didn’t fix the problem sadly.  So next on the list was the SMC reset described here.  Lo and behold this did the trick!  Everything was back to normal!  Woooohooo!

Now I will keep my fingers crossed for no more random KPs 🙁

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