Slow Graphics Performance MacOS High Sierra

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You are not furthering any case of anything when that happens.

• When you file a Bug Report, someone in Engineering is responsible for determining if it is Accurate, Unique, and ultimately Reproducible. If it is all of those, Engineers will take a hard look at it.

That is definitely preferable.

This is horror! I run MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) with NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB and it ***** so much as the initial post described. I even managed to setup CUDA and the computational performance is reasonable. I am now sure that it is macOS High Sierra that fails to utilize the hardware properly for GUI management.

Can someone test macOS 10.13.3 with latest nVidia driver 387.10.10.10.25.161? I saw in other discussion, that this driver may fix our issues. But I don't want to install macOS 10.13.3 without confirmation personaly 🙂.

@brendymullan

Unfortunately I haven't tried and won't. It's my work laptop that I'm not willing to throw into a beta program. I usually hold off on updates for a while too for the same reason but your post about 10.13.4 potentially fixing the GPU issues with the 750m have me hopeful and I'll likely try it soon after it's out of beta. Otherwise I may just downgrade to Sierra as the 750m and Metal 2 otherwise appear to be incapable of functioning to an acceptable performance.

Fingers crossed.

Sorry if I sound cranky with you. I'm not. I'm cranky with Apple. Not that there is a bug, I can understand with millions of lines of code, very fast paced release cycles ... bugs happen. I'm disappointed that they do not keep us in the loop. We do not even know if they acknowledge this issue is real, are they working on it, are they denying it, are they ignoring it, what is going on Apple?

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As for the discussion at hand - as a software engineer I would want to know all the issues about a particular behavior. Not fragments of a jigsaw puzzle I would have to spend a lot of time piecing together.

If I was fixing this I'd want to know about the scaling, external vs internal only, along with everything else mentioned in this thread/topic.

I see all it all as one big issue albeit with different symptoms. (They are shifting OpenGL's position with the insertion of Metal 2 at the foundation and hoping nobody will notice. Well we are noticing).

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But Grant wrote "Apple support does NOT monitor these forums looking for trends and outstanding issues."

No wonder they are so out of touch. This issue has been going on for 6 months. No sign of a solution. Not a word.

Have a nice day (and once again sorry if I sounded cranky with you).

I will, I usually tax the hardware pretty hard but I've yet to run into the issues with hardware resets. Are you logging temps of the components of your system while you're using it?

Due to the design of the heatsinks and fans in the unibody macbook pros I end up having to clean them out regularly in order to keep the fans from running amok and being unable to keep components at resonable temps.

I'm a Chrome-user which could explain why I'm not seeing the issues in the same extent as you are but I'll try to switch over in the interest of troubleshooting.

@Eli: Thanks, same model as mine, yep.

@Vector: I hadn't monitored the temperatures as the resets happened so rarely. This is just observational, which I'm aware is worth very little compared to actual facts, but I don't feel it correlates to temperature. I work in design and notice the resets only happen in AutoCAD, Cinema4D or Blender when a viewport manipulation is followed by a long pause, then a black screen and the Apple logo for a reboot. The fans may not have even kicked in at that point (particularly in AutoCAD), nor do I feel they should have (incase that's the problem).

I've never had the reset happen from, say rendering a video out which taxes the CPU and GPU (task dependant) to the point where the fans are at max for hours).

The pattern I've noticed is that it seems to be software using GPU acceleration inside the macOS UI. I don't believe it has to be Metal as I think all of the above software is using OpenGL. Anyway, I'm digressing a little as the main thread is on UI stutters and they're something I experience throughout the day. The reboots are rare, perhaps once a month at most.

@Eli The nVidia web driver was the first thing I tried to resolve my issue, and it did not make a difference to my "laggy" graphics at non-native resolutions.

Again, on my external monitor, 4k is fine. Any other resolution above 1080p (not including 4k) is laggy as per my video above, either using the built in drivers or the nVidia Web Driver. Everything worked fine on Sierra, so this tells me it's something to do with Metal 2, the windowserver process, and "scaled" resolutions, even if the "scaling" is a resolution reduction from my monitor's

any monitor that's using a DisplayLink cable.

I am not sure you used the term you meant to there.

DisplayLink is a technology for creating un-accelerated Software screen buffers and sending them out across mundane interfaces like USB-2.

¿what did you mean to say?

it is better but still with issues. Both stock and Ndivia webdriver have lags. Less than before so it is like we are almost there ... so maybe 10.13.5 will solve the issue... for now 10.12.x wins by far in UI smoothness 😉

I did; it’s tracked by Apple, it includes kernel memory usage spiking unnaturally (as per the multiple sysdiagnoses I did) and I’m not the only one experiencing it. It’s just related to the Radeon Pro series of GPUs instead of the NVIDIA ones. I’m just posting here as a FYI for anyone else who is searching for info on the issue and ending up in this thread.

Edit: It’s not random, it’s happening in specific scenarios, and happens less often with the most recent macOS version 10.13.4. — but I don’t want to hijack the thread further. I’m just adding this because I’ve seen others who have problems with Radeon Pro-based MBPs post here, too.

Before you start, you need to disable SIP - Reboot into recovery mode (CMD + R), open terminal and run "csrutil disable".

Then you need to unzip downloaded files. I assume you do it in your home/Downloads folder:

After you unpack both files open terminal:

cd /System/Library/Extensivnější

sudo cp -r ~/Downloads/Lilu.kext .

sudo cp -r ~/Downloads/NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext .

Then you need to reboot.

I've run GFXBench on latest Nvidia drivers and they show the same results as previous Nvidia ones and Apple's default driver from 10.3.4, which is about 25% lower score than integrated GPU.

(MBP 2012 with 650m)

For future reference:

Re: Website Graphics Problems with High Sierra

Sierra/High Sierra scaling issues

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736

Even on a clean install and forcing to use the discrete graphics doesn't resolve the issue. And my hardware runs perfect on Sierra, just not on High Sierra.