13" MBP 2012 freeze, HD4000 graphics to blame?

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Level 1

34 points

13" MBP 2012 freeze, HD4000 graphics to blame?

I bought my 13" MBP (2012) two days ago and have tried running a few programs that push the graphics capabilities. I know the 13" has no discrete GPU, but did not think that running graphics-intensive tasks would freeze the entire system, requiring a forced shutdown (holding power button for 5 seconds).

The two most recent freezes were running X-Plane. After the first freeze, I set up a program called Temperature Monitor and saw that after X-Plane loaded and started playing, the GPU diode had gone past 103°C. I quit X-Plane and it started cooling off, but the system froze the second time after it reached 92°C.

Other freeze include Chrome using its built-in Flash to run the "Scale of the universe 2" interactive animation (GPU temperature doesn't seem to go above 70°C when doing this), and in Safari when checking out Google Maps' new WebGL features.

Unfortunately there are no crash or kernel panic logs for any of these.

On my old white MacBook (late 2006), when the CPU temperature rises above 80C, e.g. when trying to play some (but not all) HD videos, there will be audio and visual stutters, at which point I stop doing what I was doing.

Is there not some kind of failsafe in OSX or the video driver that chokes the GPU when it exceeds a certain temperature? If not, how are we to supposed to know when something will spike the GPU? There is no warning to *not* run games or graphics program just because it has no discrete GPU.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 4 GB RAM

Posted on Jul 11, 2012 4:33 PM

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Answer 1

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

34 points

Jul 11, 2012 11:41 PM in response to ChanaiCh

And yes, all system updates have been applied, including "MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) Software Update 1.0" which claims to "improve graphics stability".

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Answer 2

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

34 points

Jul 12, 2012 9:31 AM in response to ChanaiCh

Two more system freezes this morning: X-plane again, and in Safari running a WebGL experiment (http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/cube/).

The GPU diode temperature at time of freeze was 92C for X-plane (after peaking at 102C five minutes earlier and still ran fine) and 82C for Safari/WebGL.

After a forced shutdown and restart, Lion restored Safari to the WebGL demo page, but with a badly corrupted window, seen in screenshot below, behind the Activity Monitor. Not even its titlebar was rendered correctly:

After clicking into this window it refreshed and showed the expected contents.

Neither freeze happened while running the program/webapp itself, it froze almost immediately after closing the program or window. Maybe this isn't just a GPU overheating issue, it's also happening when trying to release VRAM shared with main RAM?

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Answer 3

Jul 13, 2012 10:34 AM in response to ChanaiCh

I have the same. I have the MBP 15" 2012. I have updated my Mac a while ago but it's not working. Have you fixed it? Please let me kow, maybe we can help each other.

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Answer 4

McManni

Level 1

15 points

Jul 13, 2012 11:17 AM in response to ChanaiCh

This is probably due to the widely documented bug in the driver of the HD4000 graphics card. It causes crashes in Chome (there is an updated version available with graphics acceleration disabled) and in Parallels (you need to switch 3D graphics acceleration off in the VM configuration to stop the crashes. In all cases, these workarounds come with a performance hit until Apple/Intel release an updated driver for the HD4000.

Users with a Macbook Pro 15 might be able to disable the integrated GPU (Intel) and force the OS to use the discrete GPU (nVidia) to avoid the crashes.

See http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/google-confirms-chrome-bug-is-causing-crash es-on-latest-macbook-air/ for more info on the google chrome bug.

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Answer 5

Jul 13, 2012 11:19 AM in response to McManni

That could be possible, but that card must work propperly. It's not my intention after 4 weeks to disable my grafic card. Let's hope fot an update.

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Answer 6

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

34 points

Jul 13, 2012 1:44 PM in response to Mathijss95

Not fixed yet. I called Apple support, not expecting a fix, but added one more voice (officially) to the chorus of MBP users with HD4000 graphics running into this issue.

The support rep acknowledged the issue and said we'll just have to wait until an(other) updated GPU driver comes out.

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Answer 7

Patopipp

Level 1

37 points

Jul 18, 2012 12:26 PM in response to ChanaiCh

I have the same problem, my mid 2012 13'' MBP freezes while playing Diablo 3, it sometimes freezes as soon as I open the game, it always happens when I close the game. Chrome used to freeze but with this new update that disabled the acceleration it doesn't crash anymore. I believe the Intel HD 4000 driver is the problem. Apple phoned me twice and asked me to mail them some logs, so they might be working on a solution. Maybe Mountain Lion fixes the problem.

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Answer 8

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

34 points

Jul 29, 2012 8:36 PM in response to ChanaiCh

Wondering if anyone has upgraded to Mountain Lion yet, and checked wihether this bug still exists?

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Answer 9

McManni

Level 1

15 points

Jul 30, 2012 12:55 AM in response to ChanaiCh

I installed ML on Friday eve, switched 3D graphics acceleration on in Parallels, and have used it all week-end without one single crash. So as far as I'm concerned, yes, ML does solve this issue. Signing off now.

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Answer 10

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

34 points

Jul 31, 2012 6:56 PM in response to ChanaiCh

Got my ML upgrade code, but wanted to see if the crash would happen on a fresh install OS so I installed ML onto an external drive.

Launched X-Plane, played around with it for over half an hour, no crash. Temperature on CPU3 and graphics card exceeded 105°C at times, averaged around 90°C, but no crash. Great, problem's fixed!

Not so fast.

I can quit X-Plane and immediately relaunch any number of times, but if I quit, then select any file, and try doing a Quicklook on it (wanted to see a screenshot I'd taken), it hard-freezes before the Quicklook popup starts appearing.

I *did* install whatever drivers TemperatureMonitor uses, so it wasn't a 100% fresh system when I tested it. I'll uninstall those drivers and try again but I doubt those have anything to do with what still seems like a GPU issue.

I'll repeat my other tests as well and see if the crash still happens.

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Answer 11

ChanaiCh Author

Level 1

34 points

Jul 31, 2012 8:53 PM in response to ChanaiCh

Drivers uninstalled, freeze still happened.

Back to regular Lion, it froze when watching a Youtube video in Safari (HTML5, not Flash).

There's never anything in the logs to report, it seems to be missing 5-10 minutes of log entries prior to the freeze.

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Answer 12

massiTO

Level 1

0 points

Aug 1, 2012 11:23 AM in response to ChanaiCh

My system is affected by the same problem: webGL in Safari and google-maps freeze the User Interface.

I have got a Mac Book Pro Retina with OS X 10.7.4. I also tried an upgrade to 10.8 but the problem was

still there.

However from system logs the problematic component seems to be the NVIDIA GPU (GeForce GT 650M) and not the integrated Intel HD 40000.

Using the application "gfxCardStatus" I forced the system to use NVIDIA during the google maps navigation

and in a few seconds the UI is frozen.

If I force to use IntelHD4000 I can navigate the maps without any problem.

Firefox does not suffer from this problem.

Here is a piece of system log right after the halt of the UI.

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: 0000006e

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: 00200000 0000a097 00000000 00000000

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: 00000000 000023ac 00000000 00000005

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: 00000000 00000000 00000000

8/1/12 1:05:12.000 PM kernel: 00000000 00000000

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Answer 13

Patopipp

Level 1

37 points

Aug 7, 2012 9:05 AM in response to massiTO

I have clean installed ML about 10 days ago, I never had any freeze like I used to have with Lion. This morning I was only using Google Chrome, I only had 1 tab opened and it froze like it usted to to with Lion on this mid 2012 MBP, this is the site I was viewing: http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/projects/armsglobe/ . I belive the graphic card has something to do with this asi this page is ''3D''.

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Answer 14

senthor

Level 1

0 points

Aug 7, 2012 10:10 AM in response to ChanaiCh

I have the 2012 MBP 13''. Ran into freezes and disorted screens while using graphic-intense applications.

I don't think this is driver related, as the exact same thing happened to me today while using a Bootcamp WIndows 7. After reboot, the temperature of the graphics chip was about 100°C — that can't be good.

For me, this looks like a hardware issue for the entire ivy bridge lineup.

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Answer 15

Patopipp

Level 1

37 points

Aug 7, 2012 10:18 AM in response to senthor

Same model over here, are you running Mountain Lion?

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