4 ms·

Very likely, the specific thing you're experiencing is poorly-engineered switching between integrated and discrete GPUs. It's not a mac-only problem, see this t

Very likely, the specific thing you're experiencing is poorly-engineered switching between integrated and discrete GPUs. It's not a mac-only problem, see this thread for a somewhat horrifying story (follow last link): https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/91ld3o/aero_15x_dgpuigpu_stutters_freezes_does_anyone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/91ld3o/aero_15x_d... A good intro to layout transitions is: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EgorYusov/20181211/332596/Taking_State_Transitions_in_Vulkan_and_Direct3D12_under_Control_a_Diligent_Approach.php https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EgorYusov/20181211/332596/Ta... The number of copies required to get a pixel from CPU space into photons today is ridiculous. It used to be you'd just write into a memory-mapped buffer, and your graphics card would scan out directly from that where it would get to the electron beam modulator in microseconds.

taeric 6y ago
This all makes sense. But I would have imagined my machine can perform several hundred copies in the time it used to take to do one. Haven't memory speeds progressed a fair bit? Such that I agree it would be better to do dirty tracking and sending just a small update to the screen. But the tricks to do that should be a lot easier than they used to be. The gpu thing in my Mac is amusing just because if I run intellij, it will cause my machine to crash. If I run emacs? Not so much. Even if I am stressing the machine with several compiles or some silly pandas data frames. If I enable gpu accelerations in my browser? Expect instability. My video chat program just boasted that they use gpu for video. And for the past two weeks, it is common for the entire video system of my machine to hang during a video chat... Literally get a crash screen.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  > Haven't memory speeds progressed a fair bit? Not really, no. Over the last 15 years CPU memory bandwidth has increased around ~10x. Meanwhile monitor resolutions have also increased around ~10x. Meaning per-pixel CPU bandwidth has been flat over the years or even regressing a little bit. Laptops have become more common yet they also lag on memory speeds, or sometimes are even just single channel. Yet they also tend to have the highest resolution displays, not a great mix if you're trying to make CPU rendering still be viable. As for your Mac issues I think you just have a broken computer. Software shouldn't be designed with the expectation that it'll be used on broken systems, that's not a realistic design constraint.
  - taeric 6y ago
    Agreed on my computer being broken. Only brought it up as evidence that not all apps are using the gpu. (And even then, I am not positive that is right.)

taeric 6y ago

This all makes sense. But I would have imagined my machine can perform several hundred copies in the time it used to take to do one. Haven't memory speeds progressed a fair bit? Such that I agree it would be better to do dirty tracking and sending just a small update to the screen. But the tricks to do that should be a lot easier than they used to be. The gpu thing in my Mac is amusing just because if I run intellij, it will cause my machine to crash. If I run emacs? Not so much. Even if I am stressing the machine with several compiles or some silly pandas data frames. If I enable gpu accelerations in my browser? Expect instability. My video chat program just boasted that they use gpu for video. And for the past two weeks, it is common for the entire video system of my machine to hang during a video chat... Literally get a crash screen.

kllrnohj 6y ago
> Haven't memory speeds progressed a fair bit? Not really, no. Over the last 15 years CPU memory bandwidth has increased around ~10x. Meanwhile monitor resolutions have also increased around ~10x. Meaning per-pixel CPU bandwidth has been flat over the years or even regressing a little bit. Laptops have become more common yet they also lag on memory speeds, or sometimes are even just single channel. Yet they also tend to have the highest resolution displays, not a great mix if you're trying to make CPU rendering still be viable. As for your Mac issues I think you just have a broken computer. Software shouldn't be designed with the expectation that it'll be used on broken systems, that's not a realistic design constraint.
- taeric 6y ago
  Agreed on my computer being broken. Only brought it up as evidence that not all apps are using the gpu. (And even then, I am not positive that is right.)