macOS High Sierra 10.13 slow graphics after battery sleep

Sorry I respectfully disagree about "not helping anyone", how can the facts and details not help?

Recently:

Short sleeps, between 5 to 10 minutes did not trigger the issue.

Two long sleeps over 3 hours did not trigger it.

The 45 minute sleep is what triggered it.

For me it is intermittent but happens about 80% of the time. I realise this could all just be dancing around some threshold but all these facts need to be known.

The other piece of fine detail is I'm getting a slow of 100 fps (for a specially test program I have), but when going fast it sometimes goes 300 fps yet at other times 400 fps - all other things being equal this is a big variation.

I'm also wanting this variation sorted out, with Sierra I was getting +/- 1 fps - rock solid.

I haven't been able to reproduce it yet. Sleep and wake several times now with various times of sleep. Even had it sleep over night. So my question is, maybe I need an external display to trigger the slowdown? Currently I'm just using the internal display. I had the slowdown happen to me once on 10.13.1 while using an external display. Now since 10.13.2 it hasn't happened yet, but maybe it's because I'm only using the internal display. Would be good to narrow down what triggers the problem.

The problem still happens for me with 10.13.2. It doesn't matter if an external display is connected, the problem still happens. I have no time to check all possible configurations with that though.

I pretty much can rule out any third party software, as the problem also occurs after a clean install of High Sierra. It also didn't occur under Sierra, and my software stack hasn't changed since, only updates of Photoshop and Wacom Driver software were installed. But again, it also happens under a clean High Sierra with nothing on it than a benchmark.

Oh and by the way: 10.13.2 fixed a security bug somewhere in the graphics stack, so this might explain any updated drivers or kernel extensions that we might see in that area.

When you put the machine to sleep was the 2nd graphics card already engaged? Games, graphics app or even Chrome will engage it. Or maybe you have Energy Saver / "Automatic switching" unchecked?

In all these cases I've never seen the issue.

But if you put the machine to sleep with the 2nd card disengaged, then wake it, run a graphics app to check your frame rate you should see the issue about half the time.

Some people were saying it's intermittent, others say it happens all the time. So I put that to test.

Over the past few days I've done this particular test 30 times: 17 times it work up in a slow mood ("the issue"), 13 times it woke up and ran quickly! So it happened about 56% of the time, not 100% (as I once thought).

The length of sleep time doesn't seem to matter either.

(MBP 15" 2017 model with Radeon 555, High Sierra 10.13.1)

For now I became "High Sierra Fail Guru" and I can fall into GPU throttling even without Sleep mode in one session:

1. Few hours of Arnold 2 CPU+dGPU rendering (with C4D R18 and Substance Painter 2 running). Powered by adaptor, high heat and noise production, all power savings are off;

2. Publish WIP and results via Safari. During that process laptop became quiet and cold.

3. And not C4D nor World of Warcraft couldn't engage dGPU again in same session - fans are not running, very poor performance and all I can do is ruin my progress and my mood and go reset...

4. Raise and repeat 🙂

Same here - also with newest update. Why isn’t Apple responding in this thread?

I have had luck with making the machine going into sleep with the game open and wait for it to go completely to sleep and then open again. And voila normal FPS in the game again.

I can’t understand why Apple doesn’t do anything?

Thanks,

Just to clarify for other readers.

If you have Automatic switching checked it'll force the 2nd GPU to run constantly - then when you sleep/wake I don't expect you'll see the issue. It seems to retain the fast mood all the time at the expense of short battery life.

But if you don't have the 2nd GPU engaged then sleep/wake for me it'll go slow about 56% of the time. Once it's going slow if you uncheck Automatic switching it'll be too late. Once it goes slow nothing, we found so far, can bring it back to speed except a full shutdown.

I believe Apple is looking at it.

Hopefully they can replicate the issue, some days it happens almost all the time for me yet on other days only 50%.

With any software from any company there's always a lot to do for a new release:- gather information, replicate the issue, schedule it, fix it, re-test, document .... so I am not at all surprised it didn't get into 10.13.2. I am hoping it'll make 10.13.3

Originally the corner stone of graphics rendering was OpenGL, then Metal came in the mix and now Metal 2 - don't look now but the very foundations are being changed under our feet. No surprise there are issues.

Just hoping they'll continue solid support for OpenGL going forward, I don't want to be in the middle of a Vulcan, DX11, Metal 2 war.

I did the downgrade to Sierra, too. Apple Support couldn't help me fix the problem, but I need this to work reliably. I am sending them a bunch of log files and benchmark results instead, they are going to speak with some developers about the issue then. Or so the support person claimed.

I can only recommend that everyone with this issue is pitching the story to some tech news pages. I did this here in Germany with "Golem.de" and "Heise Online", and both of them published an article about the issue. Maybe others reported it, too:

https://www.heise.de/mac-and-i/meldung/Bug-in-macOS-High-Sierra-mindert-Grafikle istung-nach-Ruhezustand-3914088.html

MacOS High Sierra: Grafikleistung beim Macbook Pro bricht durch Bug ein - Golem.de

Golem.de even reproduced the issue on their own devices.

If more tech news magazines are picking up on this, we could stand a chance in getting our fix soon ;-)

Just updated to 10.13.3 Beta 1 and I'm still able to reproduce the issue.

For now I'm using a utility called NoSleep to prevent my MacBook Pro from sleeping when I close the lid (display turns off though), because restarting multiple times a day for the correct dGPU performance is a hassle.

https://andytran93.com/2017/11/12/dgpu-low-performance-bug-in-macos-10-13-high-s ierra/

If it was so, AMD dGPUs wouldn't encounter these problems.

BTW: After 10.13.2 update the trick with Sleep mode with 3D application opened seems to not working for me anymore.

15" AMD 560 Touch-bar model.

So I've been in the same boat for long now and have been following this thread and talked to Apple too without any luck.

But I have now found out during the past week that when I play my usual game of LOL, I now tick off the setting "Wait for Vertical Sync (disables Software Mouse handling)".

This works for me and will give me full FPS in game.

Im running on a MID 2012 Macbook pro with intel graphics only.

The only workaround that works for me, i've downgraded to macOS Sierra. With that everything works fine. A permanent reboot (more than 20 times a day) is not what i expect from Apple. Also what i not expect from Apple, to say nothing about this bug after two weeks. This is not CRM

I switched back to Sierra when I saw some people complaining about 10.13.2 not being able to install and some of them got restarts and unable to boot. Basically Apple royally ******. LONG LIVE ANIMOJI!

I have been running 10.13.3 Beta 2 and on my Late 2015 MBP with AMD Graphics the issue seems to have been resolved. I have been testing all this week, and it wakes up from sleep and I am not seeing any graphics slowdowns