macOS Core Image is now using the software OpenGL renderer. This will be slow.

[larswik]

Hello, it's ben a while since I have posted here and have a new problem I am trying to figure out. I wrote a program years ago to help me create images and turn them in to mp4 videos. After updating to 10.12 I had problems with the program stopping the render at 475 of 540 frames and when I opened it up and tested it in Xcode I got this message

Core Image is now using the software OpenGL renderer. This will be slow.

It is not giving me an error message but it slowed the render from about 4 frames a second to 1 every 5 minutes. Using Activity monitor it seemed like the 13 gigs I had want working so I just upgraded to 24 gigs and I still get the problem? Since I am not getting an error message I am not sure how to approach solving this? Can anyone point me in the right direction? This program still worked fine on my laptop so I had been using that for the past year but it died a few days ago firing me back to my old 2011 6 core tower.

I am assuming it is a memory issue of some kind?

 

[robvas]

Nothing to do with memory. Either go back to 10.11 or you have to fix the video drivers (upgrade or self-sign a driver - look on tonymacx86)

 

[pier]

"software OpenGL renderer" means the CPU is being used instead of the GPU. This is most probably a move from Apple to deprecate OpenGL software in favor of Metal.

 

[AphoticD]

Take a read through this article:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1502/_index.html (Technical Q&A QA1502 - Ensuring hardware accelerated rendering for your OpenGL application)

Make sure both NSOpenGLPFAAccelerated and NSOpenGLPFANoRecovery are set in the pixelformat setup.

It is likely the NSOpenGLContext (or CIContext) is leaking. If you are instantiating the context on each render, see if you can just store and re-use it instead. Your RAM shouldn’t be insufficient to render your video frames. unless we’re talking 5K video, then those 540 frames would be about 12GB in memory uncompressed. But you would want to write out each frame to file instead of storing it in RAM.

 

[larswik]

Take a read through this article:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1502/_index.html (Technical Q&A QA1502 - Ensuring hardware accelerated rendering for your OpenGL application)

Make sure both NSOpenGLPFAAccelerated and NSOpenGLPFANoRecovery are set in the pixelformat setup.

It is likely the NSOpenGLContext (or CIContext) is leaking. If you are instantiating the context on each render, see if you can just store and re-use it instead. Your RAM shouldn’t be insufficient to render your video frames. unless we’re talking 5K video, then those 540 frames would be about 12GB in memory uncompressed. But you would want to write out each frame to file instead of storing it in RAM.

Hey Guys and sorry for the late response. The issue solved it's self when I updated the OS to 10.13. !0.11 worked but 10.12 had a problem.