Macbook Pro Retina (Early 2013) 15" GPU Throttle

Question

Level 1

0 points

Macbook Pro Retina (Early 2013) 15" GPU Throttle

Every time I try anything graphic intensive (actually utilize the 650M) I get huge frameskips and framerate drops, especially after 10+ minutes. This makes gaming a chore and video rendering take a lot longer than it should..

Even though it is not designed as a gaming machine (even though these days Apple advertises Mac's for gaming) it still shouldn't be underperforming like this, especially since others with the same model as me have been able to sustain overclocked GPU clocks. Mine can't even sustain it's base clock.
I have reset SMC and PRAM countless times (even before these benchmarks below) and there's no difference.

I decided to run some benchmarks and monitor the GPU clock/usage/temperature to see what was going on. Did this in Windows 7 via bootcamp due to having no idea how to monitor GPU clocks in OSX... though visibly the problem is in OSX as well.

I decided to run the FFXIV:ARR benchmark due to FFXIV being the game I most often have issues with.

I ran LubboFanControl to set the fans to their max and ran through an external display (NVidia control panel set to use external display only).
I've used nvidiainspector to monitor the GPU (no overclocking, just monitoring).

Specs:

Macbook Pro with Retina Display (Early 2013)

Intel Core i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M (1GB GDDR5, 900/2508)
Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks
Windows 7 x64

Bootcamp NVidia Drivers - 1920x1200 Lowest Settings - Score: 5327

A maximum temperature of 73 degrees throughout the benchmark basically rules out thermal throttling (at least it should..).
It's throttling when the GPU is being fully utilised as well.

Most Recent NVidia Drivers (332.21) - 1920x1200 Lowest Settings - Score: 5516

Better benchmark score but the throttling still persists as it did before. This isn't a matter of outdated drivers.

___________

I briefly mentioned this to tech support at the Apple Store when I took it in to replace the display (dead pixel cluster) though all they did was replace the display and format the hard drive. After reinstalling Windows there's no difference.

Any ideas on what is happening? Is there some tiny issue that I can fix easily that I somehow missed?
Or do I have faulty hardware and owe the Apple Store another visit?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013), 650M Throttle

Posted on Jan 9, 2014 11:53 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 24, 2014 8:58 PM in response to sighmon8x

I have the exact same problem on my non retina base model mid 2012 pro 15. It is in both OSX and bootcamp. If I set the settings to a 100% playable framerate then the issue is very minimal. If I try to push it into 30fps and below or run benchmarks, performance is terrible and the gpu stalls just as yours does. I've read a few others with similar issues. Thanks for the post. I hope Apple can do something about this with an SMC/EFI/BOIS update. I believe it is hardware related because it happens in two different OS.

Reply