Only intel GPU selectable

[blue heron]

Can anyone help me out with an issue I have with playing Civ6 on my Macbook pro? I've come back to this game after a 6 month hiatus, and now I can only select the intel graphics 630 GPU on my 2017 macbook pro, and not the Radeon Pro 560 that's also in this machine. Performance suffers because of this. In the Activity Monitor, I do see however that the graphics card is set to 'Yes' for the Civ process.

 

[LFRANK]

First, are you running in battery mode? MacBooks always try their best to conserve power when not plugged in and will use the Intel graphics at every opportunity.

Second, you can goto System Preferences > Energy Saver and disable the Automatic graphics switching option. Beware as this will quickly drain your battery using the 630 GPU to play. II get barely over an hour of game play when not plugged in but YMMV.

Best of luck.

 

[blue heron]

No, was running with power plugged in. When I played CIV 6 before (didn't play in approx 6 months before now) it always used the Radeon Pro. It runs hot though - the Mac port seems to be rather poor on performance.

 

[LFRANK]

Okay, you got me now.

Only other suggestion I have is to reset the NVRAM and SMC on the machine. Both contain misc settings used by the hardware that sometimes get confused. Try the steps listed in this MacWorld article How to reset a Mac's NVRAM, PRAM, and SMC.

If this doesn't solve the problem, you may need to get it checked out at an Apple store.

Best of luck.