Poor dGPU performance Yosemite

[d3k]

Specs: Late 2013 15" Macbook Pro with Intel Iris Pro, and NVIDIA GT750M
16GB Ram and i7 2.3GHz

Has anyone experienced very poor graphics performance since updating to Yosemite?

I've included two screenshots showing worse performance using the GT750M than the Intel Iris Pro on the same machine. These screenshots, however, don't do justice. In practice, when I play games like Diablo 3 and WoW, the GT750M not only gives worse FPS than the Iris Pro, but the GT750M has extremely dramatic FPS spikes when nothing on the screen has changed to any significant degree.

Lately, I've been using gfxCardStatus to set my system to use my Integrated rather than Dedicated to get somewhat usable performance. I regret buying the machine with the dedicated GPU.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

 

[d3k]

Is anyone else willing to do the same benchmark that I did on their same-model Macbook Pro to compare?

Later, when I get a chance, I'm going to install mavericks on a separate partition and benchmark using the same settings.

 

[d3k]

Well, I got unexpected results with a fresh install of Mavericks. Even worse performance on the GT750M.

I'm pretty sure in both cases (Yosemite & Mavericks) the GT750M should be outperforming the Intel Iris Pro.

 

[yjchua95]

Well, I got unexpected results with a fresh install of Mavericks. Even worse performance on the GT750M.

I'm pretty sure in both cases (Yosemite & Mavericks) the GT750M should be outperforming the Intel Iris Pro.

Benchmarks aren't everything and don't always indicate real world performance.

For instance, the Iris Pro will beat the NVIDIA in OpenCL tasks, while the NVIDIA will beat the Iris Pro in gaming and CUDA tasks.

 

[d3k]

Benchmarks aren't everything and don't always indicate real world performance.

For instance, the Iris Pro will beat the NVIDIA in OpenCL tasks, while the NVIDIA will beat the Iris Pro in gaming and CUDA tasks.

In practice, when I play games like Diablo 3 and WoW, the GT750M not only gives worse FPS than the Iris Pro, but the GT750M has extremely dramatic FPS spikes when nothing on the screen has changed to any significant degree.

Those are real-world applications - those are gaming applications. The benchmarks I posted were to re-enforce my issue with numbers.

Did you skip over that part, or something? Oops!

 

[yjchua95]

Those are real-world applications - those are gaming applications. The benchmarks I posted were to re-enforce my issue with numbers.

Did you skip over that part, or something? Oops!

Unigine isn't a game. It's just a benchmark and not representative of modern games that use different (and far more advanced engines, like the Frostbite engine).

Diablo 3 and WoW on OS X aren't properly optimized for OS X, and we all know how lousy NVIDIA drivers are in OS X.

I play Battlefield 4 in Boot Camp on my rMBP with 750M, with 1680x1050, mix of high and ultra, 16xAF and FXAA, and get 47-50 fps on average, with the lowest being 35 fps and getting 60 fps in quite a lot of situations. Tried the same thing on an Iris Pro only rMBP and could barely break 25 fps on identical settings.

 

[d3k]

I realize that it's not a game. It's much like a game map that does a camera fly-through and measures FPS.

Blizzard's engines optimized or not, I should be performing better with 750M than my Iris Pro which is the topic here.

So any ideas why my Iris Pro is outperforming my 750M?

 

[leman]

There must be something wrong with your computer. I get 591 points on my 650M with same settings. The 750M should score higher at any rate. Did you reset SMC/PRAM and the other usual suspects?

Did you also try running the benchmark under Windows, to see if its OS X specific?

Unigine isn't a game. It's just a benchmark and not representative of modern games that use different (and far more advanced engines, like the Frostbite engine).

Unigine is an engine, which is licensed to multiple games and virtual reality simulators. It might be not as fancy as Frostbite, but its still a real engine and benchmarks based on it attempt to be as close to real games as possible.

 

[d3k]

There must be something wrong with your computer. I get 591 points on my 650M with same settings. The 750M should score higher at any rate. Did you reset SMC/PRAM and the other usual suspects?

I did reset my SMC/PRAM, but haven't gotten any better results unfortunately. The fresh install of Mavericks really surprised me coupled with the results I got really surprised me.

Tomorrow, I'll re-install windows in Bootcamp and try the same test to see what results I get.

 

[Teuthos]

I do not know the cause, but I can offer some benchmarks of my own for comparison.

Your settings are 1440x900 with a custom preset, so I do not know what settings you had exactly and thus the results are not directly comparable. However, when running the benchmark at 1280x720 2xAA with the Basic preset, I got a score of 919. Try running with the same settings if you want to get directly comparable results.

That is clearly far in excess of what you're getting and suggests that there is something wrong with your hardware, software or both. I suggest asking Apple to fix it.

 

[d3k]

I installed Windows 8.1 and loaded up the same benchmark. I got equally poor results on the GT750M, so I'm not even going to post the screenshots here.

However, I noticed something very peculiar. The windows version of the Heaven benchmark displays the current clock speeds of the GPU. Every few seconds, the "Graphics clock" and "Memory Clock" get reduced by half and stay that way for another several seconds. I would imagine this throttling is happening in my games during the spikes.

It's normally at 925Mhz and 780Mhz, and every few seconds it throttles down to 405 MHz and 419MHz respectively - about half the time it's at this throttled speed.

Searching the forums, this seemed relevant:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1695702/