Problems with ATI Radeon HD 5770 In Yosemite and Pro Tools 11

This discussion will be here for a long time, and other Readers may find their way here by searching. Does everyone have to disable Beam Sync, or is there something special about your Hardware or software that means you do, but others don't?

If there is there an article, or a small group of articles that pinpoints the problem and its solution, could you share a link to it?

Hey Rosewood,

thanks for your post on my youtube channel, I am going to try your Xcode fix today and will

get back. I love how people say you must be doing something wrong... Avid is always having to play catch up to Apple and there

are bugs in every version of Pro Tools. This one only seems to effect certain computers. My Mac Pro has the issue but with the same setup on my MacBook pro I do not have the issue. I have seen folks with GT120 s have the issue so its not just AMD cards.

I did a clean install, and really only have the issue in a Pro tools 11.3 and 10.10.1 other wise things are ok For me with Yosemite.

Also Pro Tools 11.3 runs fine in 10.8.5 so the issue is with Yosemite and 11.3.

In the Avid forums several folks have the same issue. Here is my video on it as you have already seen but others may want to see it

as it shows the issue in the video, for some reason if I run the screen capture app screenflow the Pro Tools bug goes away which I stumbled upon when I was going to make the video about the issue with Pro Tools and Yosemite.

http://youtu.be/doErM0eBWIk

I will get back after I try your fix.

thanks and I feel your pain!

Dude! Rosewood you have made a major discovery for me!! thanks so much for sharing.

First off it took a while to find the Quartz Debug app. Had to register as a developer after downloading Xcode then I found it by going to the drop down menu

under Xcode / select "open developers tools" / more tooks / download "Graphics Tools for Xcode 6.1"

All I have to do is run the Quartz Debugg app and bingo Pro Tools graphics are no longer glitchy. It is obviously a bug!

I do not however have to disable Beam Sync, I just run the app and things are smooth, but here is the pure awesomeness of it all. Within Quartz DeBug is a Frame meter. He shoots he scores!!! 🙂

When you do turn off the Beam Sync your frame rates on all GPU intensive apps shoots up 5 to 10 frames a second. First I tried Pro Tools which was averaging 60fps as I just hit playback on one track with no audio, no glitching, then I disabled Beam Sync which seems like Vsync option in games, when I turned it off pro tools then jumps up to over 90fps. So then I tried a Valley GPU benchmark app and the same thing happened my frames per second jumped up 5 to 10fps faster.

So cool I love the meter and the fact that I got faster frames in Valley. You do get some screen tearing when moving windows around.

Must play some more but this is an awesome find. I am almost happy about Pro Tools 11s bug as I never would have found this app otherwise.

So why PT works fine on my macbook pro with 10.10.1 and not on the mac pro is still a mystery, but this little app solves it for now and also will pump up

my frame rate on things when I want it to.

Thanks again. I am going to do some more testing. And def make a video with a Shout Out my friend great work!

In other conversations I have had in other forums it has been revealed that this is a long-standing ProTools issue. Try running the frame rate meter. The edit window pins the meter at 112 FPS. Disabling beam sink speeds up the graphic response but apparently has other negative consequences with tearing etc.

It will take a lot of pressure on Avid to get them to change this. It's been a problem for a long time.

You seem pretty confident that this was self-inflicted. But you're probably wrong.

2010 Mac Pro + Yosemite + Radeon 7950

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/961633

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1553770?sr=inbox

There are two well documented problems. One is performance slow-down, screen-tearing, and shutoff with the Apple-supplied Radeon cards. The other is system crippling graphics bugs, most evident in Adobe products (but not limited to) that affects all NVIDIA card users.

The root cause of both of these issues might be different, but it is abundantly clear that Apple has not yet debugged their graphics implementation in Yosemite, both for CUDA and OpenGL. This is affecting even 2014 MBPs. With all graphics card options currently plagued by bugs, Mac Pro users are stuck on Mavericks or Moutain Lion until Apple releases a patch. Not the end of the world, obviously, but I remember when OSX came on a disk and actually worked out of the box. I'd love the new Messages SMS functionality someday.

Sorry Grant, I missed the 2nd page here.

History says the "dot two" at least before OS X is ready for users. 10.4.0 could not be used on a LAN and had to wait (and 4.1 was in the works well before 4.0 came out). 10.6 had its bugs and problems with graphic drivers. Lion faired no better. 10.8? really? and depending on hardware 10.9.5 finally nailed it.

10.4 came on DVD for 10.4.3 due to problems, and some significant changes in 10.4.5/.6 (retail was PowerPC only, there was no retail Intel 10.4 DVDs sold).

Lion had to deal with new SATA III and SSDs, deal with Thunderbolt and new wireless chips.

Mac Pro users push the envelope with more hardware changes, a small market, and production systems would usually avoid the bleeding edge in favor of sitting back and not rocking the boat. Professional workstations and apps probably, to me, don't like constant churning and turnover and yearly releases. My guess is one good well tested update instead would be nice, not a new OS, more like an old "SP1" or SP2 instead.

It was not until 10.4.x that RAID arrays improved enough to move beyond the (still slow) level of OS 9 and get beyond 130MB/sec speed - people use to spend a lot of money to create photoshop scratch volumes by raid0 of 4 or 8 10k or 15k scsi drives. And that was one area that 10.4.6 addressed and was needed to be on DVD.

10.5.6 also came on retail DVD and again dealt with graphic drivers and slow performance and lack of support in 10.5.0 for a few cards. The EVGA GTX 275 was BTO welcome addition but had trouble even with 10.5.8 (was suppose to work with 10.5.7 or higher) and really needed drivers in 10.6.x. There were issues with Adobe apps and ATI 4870 in 10.6.4 and even 10.6.5 and ATI 5770 was trouble.

Just a few graphic driver OS X issues?

Just got this from Avid tech support.

"There is possibly an issue, particularly when using multiple displays, that is coming into play on Yosemite that was not happening in Mountain Lion and sounds like something that may need to come from Apple. I'm glad to know that you have a workaround by running Quartz. The issue seemed to get better when we were troubleshooting by disconnecting 2 of the 3 monitors but I know this is not really a good solution for you. You are more than welcome to contact us here again for further troubleshooting on this when you are able. "

Possibly and may.... 😉

So they are sort of admitting there is a problem but state it is on Apple's end and they need to fix the issue.

In my additional tests it still happens in PT 12 and 10.10.3 beta I'm sorry to say. Some people don't have the issue but I have seen folks with AMD cards

and Geforce have the same issue. A real time suction this one...and keeps me from being able to transition to Yosemite fill time. Now I am switching back and for between MT Lion and Yosemite.

Don't know if your still getting that problem , but i wanted you to know that I had the the same problem , i solved it by doing a SMC restart ,( after that the screen on boot up will go very funny, but don't worry when you get to the Login page shut the machine down and leave for 10 secs then do a Pram restart. You should get a beautiful screen then. hope this helps