MacBook Pro 16-inch graphic card switching causes screen freeze issue

My Macbook Pro 16-inch freezes occasionally when it switches between integrated graphic card and discrete graphic card. Sometimes it just freezes for 1-2 seconds, but sometimes it may freeze up to 1 minute and I have to close the lib and re-open to regain control of the machine.

This issue never happened in my 2016 MBP.

Tools that I used to reproduce this issue:

0. turn on Automatic graphics switching in Energy saver in System Preferences

launch gfxCardStatus https://gfx.io/ to send a notification when the actual graphic card switch is triggered
open your browser and go to https://www.antutu.com/html5/ start a benchmark to trigger the graphic card switch
create a sidecar chrome tab and run the timer on google. You can notice that at 1:30, the timer changes from 1m23s26 to 1m26s61 suddenly and the notification of GPU changed pops up on the top right without any animation. This is where the actual freeze is happening

I recorded a video to showcase this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkuT5sUUS8

Is Apple aware of this issue and will there be a future fix for this?

MacBook Pro 16", macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 20, 2019 8:38 PM

Top-ranking reply

claudiocpr

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Jan 4, 2020 2:05 PM

I have the same issue with a base MacBook Pro 16" when Chrome switches from iGPU to dGPU. Looks like that Safari isn't affected by this issue, for example try to open this page on Safari that triggers the dGPU when scrolled at a certain point:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/

On my laptop scrolling and pointer movement are smooth and don't freeze during the switch. You can verify when the switch happens with the Activity Monitor on the Energy Tab.

Currently I haven't noticed this issue with any other software.

As a workaround I have disabled the use of the GPU in Chrome (the switch is available on preferences). This has some glitches and lacks support for some advanced features like WebGL.

Other workaround, as already stated, is disabling automatic switching but it involves using always the dGPU that consumes more energy, not a good solution when the laptop runs on battery with simple tasks that doesn't need so much power.

It's not clear if it's bug of Chrome, drivers or MacOS. I hope it will be fixed soon on a future update.

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MacBook Pro 16-inch graphic card switching causes screen freeze issue

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