iMac completely locks up using Blender or Unity

[someguy]

I've got a late 2015 iMac (specs in the attached image) that freezes up while using Blender or Unity. This happens even during light usage, not specifically while rendering or anything.

By "freezes up", I mean 100% locked up. The cursor stops moving, and everything comes to a halt, except audio, which plays a small buffer on a loop (typical during a system lockup, in my experience).

I'm not sure how to go about troubleshooting this. Any help is appreciated.

 

[someguy]

I'm going to upgrade to Catalina and see if that makes any difference.

 

[someguy]

No luck. Seemed to be working better for a few hours, surprisingly, but it just locked up on me again.

I figure this must be hardware related? Maybe something with the GPU, since Unity and Blender are hardware-accelerated applications.

Does anyone know what I should do?

 

[th0masp]

Subscribing to this thread since Blender also manages to lock up one of my Macs: audio still plays, cursor does still move - but nothing is clickable anymore nor does the keyboard respond. I have/had it running on two other machines without issue for a long time so I don't think its the OS version nor a specific Blender build.
I have no other application that behaves like this and I do use the computer a lot for 3D work.

If you have another machine available and remote login enabled on your computer, might want to try forcing it to crash, then ssh into the computer, see if it still responds on the command line. Check if there is any useful info when you issue the 'sudo dmesg' command.

Mine does still work headless in these cases, it seems it's the Windowserver failing to check in. Rebooting it via command line however crashes the system fully - it seems it cannot handle the frozen GUI when trying to shutdown.