NASA Website causes GPU power and temperature spike

I have a 2017 iMac Pro that has been utterly reliable since the day I bought it. I push it pretty hard as I am a Hollywood VFX artist (working remotely), a photographer, an astrophotographer and a studio musician.


This week, however, I had my first really weird issue with my iMac Pro. I am not sure if it is related to the driver for the Radeon Pro Vega 64 card I have, the recent update to MacOS Monterey or the NASA website in question.


The website is the Artemis 1 real time tracker. this is the address:

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/trackartemis/


When I load this page (in any browser) almost immediately my GPU temp spikes to nearly 200-degrees, both internal fans spin up to max and the power usage for the CPU and GPU spikes to almost 300 watts. I use iStat menus to track internal functions. here's what it looks like.



I have a couple of friends at work who have tested this webpage on our HP Z6 Linux workstations with nVidia cards, and they have no problems. However, I also have a 2015 Dell Inspiron laptop with a pretty mediocre graphics chip and the NASA tracker website maxes out the CPU and GPU and the fans kick on. Now I would expect a 7 year old $600 wintel laptop to have a hard time dealing with 3D web graphics, but not a $7,300 workstation-class pro Mac that literally gobbles up everything I can throw at it.... so I am thinking that the website is just a pig.


Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to report this to whoever made the webapp... bummer. I really enjoy tracking space missions.


Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? Has anyone else had struggles with this Artemis tracker?

iMac Pro

Posted on Nov 19, 2022 10:20 AM

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NASA Website causes GPU power and temperature spike

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