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What is Apple doing with my GPU?

J

jasoncarle

Suspended
Original poster
Jan 13, 2006
623
460
Minnesota
I turned on my Mac Studio from being completely off, cold and dark. I did nothing else at all but the GPU went to nearly 100% as you can see from the tiny little screen cap of iStat menus here. It's still going, but at a lower rate and all I am doing is typing this post in safari.

os is Monterey 12.3.1
Mac Studio Ultra all the gizmos and upgrades. It has never done this before.

Screen Shot 2022-05-11 at 9.11.40 PM.png
 
I did restart the computer. Same thing happened and Activity Monitor says nothing is using any significant GPU power.

The CPU however, is going crazy with the mds_stores process, which I understand is Spotlight indexing. I have no idea how that effects the GPU.
 
jasoncarle said:
I did restart the computer. Same thing happened and Activity Monitor says nothing is using any significant GPU power.

The CPU however, is going crazy with the mds_stores process, which I understand is Spotlight indexing. I have no idea how that effects the GPU.
Click to expand...
I don’t have any insight into whether the indexing algorithm can benefit from parallel processing, but if so there’s your answer.
 
NT1440 said:
I don’t have any insight into whether the indexing algorithm can benefit from parallel processing, but if so there’s your answer.
Click to expand...

I had that thought as well so I decided to pay attention to when mds_stores ended and remember to check GPU usage. Well, that process has finished and the GPU is still showing far more activity than normal when simply browsing the internet.
 
theorist9 said:
Ah, in that case, since iStat menus is giving you data inconsistent with Activity Montor's, why not investigate whether it's a bug in iStat menus from the start? E.g., why not delete and reinstall it?
Click to expand...

Much like an M1 Ultra processor, I am also capable of doing two things at once.
 
Since upgrading to the Mac Studio, the iStat GPU indicator has failed to accurately reflect GPU usage. Mine says 24% right now.

Click on it, and it shows the GPU history has peaked at 7% and been running about 3% over the last hour.

The CPU indicator seems to be more accurate with all economy cores continuous at 50-90%. With 1 activity 25% done in the background after 50 hours. Sort of wish it wasn't an Intel app.
 
Sun Baked said:
Since upgrading to the Mac Studio, the iStat GPU indicator has failed to accurately reflect GPU usage. Mine says 24% right now.

Click on it, and it shows the GPU history has peaked at 7% and been running about 3% over the last hour.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I did hear back from bjango just a bit ago and they got me sorted.
 
Sun Baked said:
Since upgrading to the Mac Studio, the iStat GPU indicator has failed to accurately reflect GPU usage. Mine says 24% right now.

Click on it, and it shows the GPU history has peaked at 7% and been running about 3% over the last hour.

The CPU indicator seems to be more accurate with all economy cores continuous at 50-90%. With 1 activity 25% done in the background after 50 hours. Sort of wish it wasn't an Intel app.
Click to expand...
But it’s been updated to natives support M1 like last year.
 
BanditoB said:
@jasoncarle , what did Bjango do or have you do to fix the problem?
Click to expand...

They didn't fully solve the mystery, but they showed me where to change a setting. By default iStat menu displays memory usage and not processor usage. So that solved the mismatch between what iStat menu was showing me and what Activity Monitor was showing me as Activity Monitor also shows the processor usage.

I still don't know why that much graphics memory was used at start up while nothing at all was going on.
 
Sun Baked said:
Since upgrading to the Mac Studio, the iStat GPU indicator has failed to accurately reflect GPU usage. Mine says 24% right now.

Click on it, and it shows the GPU history has peaked at 7% and been running about 3% over the last hour.

The CPU indicator seems to be more accurate with all economy cores continuous at 50-90%. With 1 activity 25% done in the background after 50 hours. Sort of wish it wasn't an Intel app.
Click to expand...

I just checked in activity Monitor and my iStat menu is not an Intel App, it's native to Apple Silicon.
 
For those of us who like our "daft third-party activity monitors", two free alternatives are the venerable MenuMeters, which is simple and been maintained over the years, along with the newer and creatively named Stats, if anyone would like to give them a try over Bjango's offering.

I'm still on an Intel Mac, so I can only provide feedback on that experience. However, both support Apple Silicon, and Stats is updated every week, if not every few days, such as recent patches for the Mac Studio.
 
One contribution to load anxiety is that the way that load is calculated usually doesn't account for modern power saving.

Most tools just do the simple thing: sample whether the device is active or not many times over some reporting interval and report the percentage of time the device (the GPU in the OP's case) is doing work.

The trouble with this time honored method is that today, CPU and GPU cores can clock down a lot to save power. If power management is good, it keeps clocks low under light, noninteractive loads. That results in an artificially high active percentage for light loads. In effect, you're seeing the percentage load for a really slow version of the CPU or GPU in question.
 
They are mining crypto’s with your GPU. With all the power these Mac Studios have, no wonder crypto’s are crashing right now.
 
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