A number of owners of Apple's mid-2010 MacBook Pro who have upgraded to OS X 10.8.3 are noticing that systems with dual graphics cards will automatically switch to using the more powerful discrete graphics chip regularly, even when using non-graphics intensive applications like Google Chrome, Dropbox, and Growl. This does not result in crashes or other interruptions in workflow, but it does increase the drain on the systems' battery and result in a shorter working time when not connected to AC power.
The 2010 MacBook Pro has had its fair share of graphics-related issues, including black-screen output when waking from sleep and graphics-related kernel panics, both related to the graphics-switching routines in the system. When problems with these systems began occurring I suspected they were hardware-based issues since they recurred on fresh OS installations and were only fixed with motherboard replacements; however, Apple took some measures to at least work around the issues with software patches.
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