macOS High Sierra 10.13 slow graphics after battery sleep

Got the same problem. MacBook itself is just about 3 months old, so no technical problems to be expected. Same as with you guys, bad FPS after long sleep. Only reboot fixes the problem.

Software that I could confirm to be affected:

- Photoshop CC 2018

- World of Warcraft

- Diablo 3

- Blender GPU Rendering

- Unigine Heaven Benchmark

On the phone with Apple support somewhen around the next few days, I'm letting you guys know if there is any news.

My System:

Unigine Heaven benchmark results (left: after some hours of sleep, right: after reboot)

Same problem on HighSierra and AMD Radeon R9 M370X

Apple and gaming/graphics are still in a confused relationship ...

Sierra vs High Sierra on NovaBench: (siera is high, like really 'high' 🙂)

Great hardware, good ideas, bad software lately 😟

I can also confirm that the bug still exists in 10.13.2 on my machine.

I did some quick digging in the system report immediately after updating to 10.13.2 and found some updated kernel extensions:

to give some clarity, I arranged the extensions with the most recently modified at the top--today at 2:55pm being when I updated to 10.13.2 -- unfortunately as I stated before, the graphics slowdown still exists on my machine (mid-2015 rMBP 15" 2.2GHz Iris Pro Only model)

"Today it slept for 3 hours and still ran quickly!"

- please, this kind of info, even if true in your case, is never ever helping anyone!

It only makes Apple say "Oh, so in some cases it works!? Than go reinstall, replace the mackbook, etc." -> it makes it a user problem, see the idea...?

And about 3hours: 2h59m59s or 3h00m00s ? ...

You see, this is like math, and 0.1 something can make all the difference!

If the GPU has gone south and is running slow then merely unchecking Automatic switching does not immediately fix anything.

But if you Shutdown / Reboot, with Automatic switching already unchecked for both Battery and Power, - then after that reboot it’ll go fast as expected -

And any subsequent sleep / un-sleeps will retain the fast performance.

I did one Shutdown / Reboot and 10 sleeps of various lengths - in all cases it continued to run fast after waking up.

I don’t now if this is a full workaround for all people for all the time but it looks promising.

The length of sleep can be anything from 5 minutes or 5 hours, battery or power ... it doesn't matter.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the battery life was not noticebly affected if you don't run any graphics intense apps.

( 2017 MacBook Pro 15" Radeon 555, High Sierra 10.13.1 )

Supplemental Update 10.13.2 was released this morning. I don't recall HD Graphics 630 showing on the About This Mac page.

Can anyone confirm if there was a change/update to the GPU driver for the Radeon? (see below; this was after the supplemental update.)

Found this to be relevant for this problem...

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1705?viewlocale=nl_NL&locale=nl_NL

The problem is that the descriptions describes exactly what is happening but my MacBook is a bit younger...

Maybe it could help someone else.

Sg1team, I think the problem is related to Intel Iris Graphics that all MacBook Pro have ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204349 ).

My Macbook (mid-2015) have only Intel Iris Pro Graphics, but some Macbook Pro also have a second (dedicated) graphic from AMD or NVIDIA. On these machines, macOS use the Intel Iris graphics as default and just move to the dedicated graphics when needed. That's to save energy/battery life.

When the user of those machines force macOS to always use the dedicated card (AMD/NVIDIA) it seems that the issue doesn't happen.

That's why I believe the issue is something related to Intel Iris graphics. This graphics share the machine memory with the system and provides slower performance but better battery life.

I believe it's easily fixable but I can't wait lazy Apple and move back to Sierra.

This is High Sierra release is a mess.

I am one of the «lucky ones» that have an Nvidia dGPU, and installing the Nvidia Web driver fixed it. And I can confirm that reverting back to the native driver brought the sluggishness back.

The Nvidia Web driver always checks the OS Build number and reverts back to Mac OS X's native driver if the OS Build is not listed as supported.

This is exactly what happened this morning after installing the latest security update.

I had to reboot my MBP for another reason, and after that I was stuck working an entire day with the native driver until Nvidia released an updated driver. After more than a week of my MBP running flawlessly and not even having to reboot it for 7days, it was laggy again.

Safari was slow and choppy while browsing and scrolling.

Scrolling in MS word on my 4k external monitor was painful. I did not experience the usual freeze after lunch break sleep, since I did not take a break today. No doubt it would have.

Seeing how many of us are having the issue, with or without Nvidia graphics cards, this indeed cannot be an Nvidia hardware issue, but there must be something that Nvidia are doing with their web driver that fixes the issue.

If Apple support staff/devs were were to acknowledge all our feedback on this thread and the one below, they might actually be able to find a fix for everyone.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

It is very frustrating that this issue doesn't seem to be acknowledged by Apple support and that our pricey Apple laptop/desktop does not receive better tested OS upgrades.

I did not choose Apple and paid such a high price to deal with this kind of crap.

Like @sff29 shows in the screenshot you can Go to Apple menu --> About This Mac --> System Report… and then choose Extensions in the left column under Software. There the version of the graphic card kernel extensions are shown. For example in macOS 10.13.1 the ”GeFore.kext” is at version 10.12.6 while in mac OS 10.13.2 it is at 10.28.10.

@borgeindergaard

Did you report it using https://bugreport.apple.com or https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html?

Guys, I have just found a solution and it worked perfect for me. You just need to reset NVRAM on your MacBook.

Here is the instructions I have found on the Internet:

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R.
3. Turn on your Mac.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys immediately after you hear the startup sound.
5. Hold these keys until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for a second time.
6. Release the keys.

Only this solution worked for me, after formatting my SSD, after reinstalling, after upgrading to macOS BETA, after trying to solve the problem with browsers (some people say that Chrome works bad with the latest macOS). But in the end only resetting NVRAM really solved the problem.

Try it! Hope it will help you.

Same problem.

My system:

- MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016) Touch Bar, AMD Radeon Pro 460

- macOS 10.13.1

The same is reported in other communities.

Frame-rate problems after DL'ing High Sierra - World of Warcraft Forums

An update to my previous reply: disabling automatic graphics switching did not resolve the issue. The graphics were slow again after the computer woke from sleep the next morning. Restarting OSX fixed the issue.