Q: Is Anyone Having MacBook Pro Retina Display Graphics Issues?

"Nvidia is one of the biggest GPU designers and manufacturers." - Nobody is too big to fail.

"Their products in general are top notch." - which is also precisely what someone from NVIDIA would say I guess.

"I believe the issues the MBPs have are related to how Apple is integrating and managing the GPUs in the system. In this particular case it seems that their power and heat is not properly monitored and managed, leading to problems." - that's a great theory, certainly as good as mine, and certainly one that NVIDIA would roll out in their defence.

It looks like between us, we got all the bases covered - thank you.

Now - which is it?

Well, as an additional data point - this morning doing some basic work on my MBP but keeping the temperature sensor window open on my desktop I noticed three of the four CPU cores spike to 95 deg C, square in the yellow range, without the fans speeding up. Some people suggest resetting the SMC, which controls the fans, but it never seems to totally solve the problem. Seems that maybe the automatic fan control algorithm in the SMC has some flaws.

After a quick Google search I found another little tool that you can use to control the fans yourself, either by setting them to a constant RPM, or linking them to your own sensor algorithm. Will give this a try for the next few days and see if I can improve on it.

Anytime I had data on a panic, the CPU was in the red for temperature. And high power chips like the CPU and GPU have big heat sinks together with a heat conducting paste between the chip and heat sink. It's entirely possible that the whole issue about swapping boards is that once you go red, that paste may run to decrease its effectiveness making the board more vulnerable to future heavy use. But the root cause may very well be a bad heat management in the SMC that allows the system to get into a runaway state that it never can completely come back from. And even though it shows up as a GPU panic, it can be triggered by a CPU heat issue, and a GPU just reacting to this as the units coordinate execution paths, or nVidia chips being less heat tolerant than the Intel chips.

And as these kinds of design flaws go, they can propagate from generation to generation of system until someone throws that component out and starts all over, which may explain why we have multiple MBP generations which all seem to be plagued by the same problem.

I've had the same problem. Moreover many people suffer from the same problem, but Apple ignore it! How is this going? What can we do?

Quick update: My system ran without any panics or temp problems for a month. In addition to the Temp Gauge app, I've also used an app call Macs Fan Control. Today I rebooted and the latter didn't auto-start, and just visiting a visually intensive web page got me to 96deg CPU temp on three cores triggering an alert.

The Mac Fans app has an option to control fan speed as a ramp based on sensor temp, rather than leaving it up to the SMC to control fan speed. That's what kept my system in good shape for the last 30 days, until the reboot took it out of the loop.

So clearly the fan control logic in the SMC is not reliable or tied to the wrong input. Using the separate Fan Control app can work around that pretty easily.

I have noticed when my mid 2012 MBP Retina comes out of sleep, it sometimes goes to a snowy (like TV static) screen for like 1/2 a second before the login screen shows up. So far I've only noticed it with the Intel 4000 card, and not the nVidia GeForce 650M, but I have not done enough testing to be certain. I started noticing this issue in beta 5 or 6 of Yosemite, and it continues to be a problem after the final release.

I saw the snowy state in Mavericks, too. Not before that though.