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2017 MBP 15 - Radeon GPU does not work after resume from long sleep

J

jeh72

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 7, 2016
305
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This issue has been driving me crazy in the past two weeks or so and I wanted to see if anyone else is running into it.

Ever since upgrading to High Sierra (I think), if I leave my MBP asleep for a few hours and come back to it, I can't play any demanding games without getting extremely low performance. I think what is happening is that the Radeon Pro 560 GPU refuses to turn on, because if I use gfxcardstatus to force integrated only the performance doesn't change. When the computer is in this state, it *thinks* it is using the dgpu (according to the Activity Monitor), but it sure doesn't seem like it. It could also be that the dgpu is stuck in a low power mode, but I don't know for sure.

I've reformatted and reinstalled macOS from scratch, tried running diagnostics, reset PRAM+SMC, etc. Rebooting the computer *does* fix problem, but I shouldn't have to do that for this thing to work.

Is anyone else seeing this issue, or do I have some sort of hardware issue?
 
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So.... I have no idea if it's a hardware issue, but I definitely see the exact same thing in my new 2017 MBP. I don't know if it was present before High Sierra, because the first thing I did after buying it was to upgrade the system. Did you figure out what was wrong? Have you spoken to Apple about it yet?
 
tibrowyko said:
So.... I have no idea if it's a hardware issue, but I definitely see the exact same thing in my new 2017 MBP. I don't know if it was present before High Sierra, because the first thing I did after buying it was to upgrade the system. Did you figure out what was wrong? Have you spoken to Apple about it yet?
Click to expand...
It's definitely a bug in high sierra. More users have written about it in this thread
 
I am also having the same problem. Only a restart helps to bring the performance back. I tried different benchmarks (open-cl, open-gl, metal) and it affects all kind of APIs, thus I think it must be driver related. In my case it only happens when the machine enters a deeper sleep state after being in stand-by for a while.
 
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Yeah, I actually only noticed that because I decided to check out Cinebench on my mac and only got 27fps on the GPU test. After restarting the machine and reruning the test - 82fps. Kind of ridiculous...
 
In the 10.13.1 Beta (17B42a) it still doesn't work. Apple's QA testing is apparently lacking. I have less bugs on my dual graphics Dell precision laptop running Fedora 26 (a bleeding edge linux distro), and that's a pretty low bar. Ridiculous.
 
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tibrowyko said:
So.... I have no idea if it's a hardware issue, but I definitely see the exact same thing in my new 2017 MBP. I don't know if it was present before High Sierra, because the first thing I did after buying it was to upgrade the system. Did you figure out what was wrong? Have you spoken to Apple about it yet?
Click to expand...

Wow I thought it was just me, but I'm experiencing this as well. Happens right from the start though.
 
If it happens from the start it might be a different thing though. In my case and jeh72's I think too, the problem happens only after the laptop has woken up from long sleep.
 
I did a PRAM+SMC reset after installing the beta to see if anything changes. Had it sleeping for 30 minutes or so and it worked fine, but the real test will be sleeping overnight.
 
Just tried it, problem still occurs. PRAM+SMC reset doesn't solve the problem.
 
I wonder what makes you think that this is a High Sierra issue? If it were, I would expect to see many more people complaining, which makes me think that our units are possibly defective?
 
tibrowyko said:
I wonder what makes you think that this is a High Sierra issue? If it were, I would expect to see many more people complaining, which makes me think that our units are possibly defective?
Click to expand...

I've had my MBP 2017 with a Radeon 560 for almost 3 months now, and never had framerate issues under Sierra.
After upgrading to High Sierra, I'm also experiencing this issue. Everytime my computer has been in Sleep mode, I get framerates that are roughly half of what I get after a fresh reboot.

Of course this is an issue with High Sierra and not the computer, when this issue never was present in Sierra at all.
 
Oh, that's actually great to hear, as this is much better problem to have than a broken laptop (IF apple fix it soon).
 
tibrowyko said:
I wonder what makes you think that this is a High Sierra issue? If it were, I would expect to see many more people complaining, which makes me think that our units are possibly defective?
Click to expand...

I think that it is a software problem because after a restart everything is working again and it only occurs after a longer sleep duration. I would guess that it is either a problem with the graphics switching or with activating the high performance mode of the GPU after it has been in low power mode.
 
--ld-- said:
I think that it is a software problem because after a restart everything is working again and it only occurs after a longer sleep duration. I would guess that it is either a problem with the graphics switching or with activating the high performance mode of the GPU after it has been in low power mode.
Click to expand...

I think it's related to low power mode. I've tried forcing the dgpu several times, and it doesn't make a difference. I can see that the dgpu is doing work, but it's still not performing well. So it must be some power management related issue in the AMD driver.

I've also experienced some screen flickering issues during graphics switching in High Sierra, which I never experienced in Sierra at all. So it's probably a faulty driver.
 
Is anyone with another dedicated graphics cards (Pro 555, Pro 4xx, R370x, all Nvidia cards) also having this problem or is it only affecting Radeon Pro 560s?
 
No issues with my pro 560, however I am on Sierra still. In the last just under 2 weeks was using it for AE after lobg perpids of sleep, 8-10 hrs, while it was connected also to a external display.
 
PortableLover said:
No issues with my pro 560, however I am on Sierra still. In the last just under 2 weeks was using it for AE after lobg perpids of sleep, 8-10 hrs, while it was connected also to a external display.
Click to expand...

Everything worked perfectly with the 560 on Sierra.
Just don't upgrade to High Sierra as of 10.13.0 yet, as this bug seems to affect every AMD card. I've seen many people complain about it on other forums also, including gaming forums (Blizzard, Riot, etc) so it seems to be a common issue with High Sierra and MBP's with AMD dgpu's.

Nobody will notice it unless they use high framerates or high GPU usage frequently on their MBP's. It should be noticeable for people using FCPX also, for example, and not just for games.
 
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0837990 said:
Everything worked perfectly with the 560 on Sierra.
Just don't upgrade to High Sierra as of 10.13.0 yet, as this bug seems to affect every AMD card. I've seen many people complain about it on other forums also, including gaming forums (Blizzard, Riot, etc) so it seems to be a common issue with High Sierra and MBP's with AMD dgpu's.

Nobody will notice it unless they use high framerates or high GPU usage frequently on their MBP's. It should be noticeable for people using FCPX also, for example, and not just for games.
Click to expand...

I also didn't notice it right away, but about a week after upgrading... If that many people are affected i guess they will fix it soon.
 
I had this issue while trying to play a game on macOS. I had to use Bootcamp to get normal performance. I hope this is fixed soon.

Remember to submit bug report if/when you encounter this!
 
I have this problem on a 2017 MBP with the Radeon 555.

I'm only playing "the witness" from steam, and attempts to find a solution other than restarting have failed.

I monitor the GPU using istat menus and can see that the GPU is only drawing around 12-15 watts, instead of its normal 33 during these periods of low performance. There are no obvious reasons for this, such as CPU bottlenecking or such, so I assume that the GPU is suck in 2D mode or some other low power state with a reduced clock frequency.

I'm not sure what changed in the high sierra update, though they implemented metal 2 right? so maybe something got screwed up in the graphics stack when switching from UI rendering and then whatever the game uses.

It would be interesting to see if the same problem exists with a game using the metal render backend, such as WoW.... I'll test this soon.

Additionally, I found that its possible for the problem to go away by itself randomly after a deep sleep cycle, only to return again after further sleep.
 
DTKblaster said:
I have this problem on a 2017 MBP with the Radeon 555.

I'm only playing "the witness" from steam, and attempts to find a solution other than restarting have failed.

I monitor the GPU using istat menus and can see that the GPU is only drawing around 12-15 watts, instead of its normal 33 during these periods of low performance. There are no obvious reasons for this, such as CPU bottlenecking or such, so I assume that the GPU is suck in 2D mode or some other low power state with a reduced clock frequency.

I'm not sure what changed in the high sierra update, though they implemented metal 2 right? so maybe something got screwed up in the graphics stack when switching from UI rendering and then whatever the game uses.

It would be interesting to see if the same problem exists with a game using the metal render backend, such as WoW.... I'll test this soon.

Additionally, I found that its possible for the problem to go away by itself randomly after a deep sleep cycle, only to return again after further sleep.
Click to expand...
The problem exists with metal as well, low frame rates in WoW is what initially tipped me off to it
 
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