nVidia GPUs and the infamous lag issue, Why is that happening?

[Kynyo]

After installation of driver don't restart and use NVWeb_Patcher script to patch OS build accordingly.

[TheBloke]

After installation of driver don't restart and use NVWeb_Patcher script to patch OS build accordingly.

 

Thank you, that did the trick!

[ReddestDream]

So, seems like 158 fixes the lag on everything but Skylake and newer, regardless of card or card generation.

 

And it also seems like maybe the lag is somewhat improved on Skylake and newer, but it's still present.

 

I've found that when 158 is not lagging, it actually seems to perform better on my 7700K/1080ti hack than 104 did . . .

[Cyberdevs]

So, seems like 158 fixes the lag on everything but Skylake and newer, regardless of card or card generation.

 

And it also seems like maybe the lag is somewhat improved on Skylake and newer, but it's still present.

 

I've found that when 158 is not lagging, it actually seems to perform better on my 7700K/1080ti hack than 104 did . . .

The webgl performance is definitely improved but overall performance specially in macOS UI and Safari is worse in my experience.

 

Is there any news from you guys? I decided to switch to AMD for now because I can't get any work done with the lags.

[brousseau6933]

Waiting for my High Sierra partition test to install: curious to see if there is any improvements in Cinebench OpenGL. Last time I tried (from .104 to .156), I had 20 fps lower than 10.12.6 with my GTX 950.

 

I'm on Haswell Refresh i7 4790 and GA Z97-UD3H for the record.

[TheBloke]

The webgl performance is definitely improved but overall performance specially in macOS UI and Safari is worse in my experience.

 

Is there any news from you guys? I decided to switch to AMD for now because I can't get any work done with the lags.

 

Out of interest, can you describe the nature and severity of the lags you see?

 

I'm still using my 760 but I've been back on the Web drivers since 159 came out.   I do sometimes see little lags, but definitely nothing that I would describe as preventing me from getting work done (with one isolated exception, described below, when I was experimenting in Final Cut Pro.)

 

I think a good test of general desktop performance is opening Mission Control.  I use BetterTouchTool to map multiple gestures to my Magic Trackpad, and I have a three-finger-swipe-upwards assigned to "Mission Control & immediately show desktop preview".  This simultaneously opens Mission Control and also expands the row of Desktops at the top, allowing immediate dragging of windows to any Space/Desktop. Having this on a gesture lets me open it quickly and easily at any time, and I do it frequently.

 

I think this is a good test of lag because it causes all windows on all screens to resize and move, as well as animating the expansion of the desktop row at top.  So it's quite a lot of movement at once.  

 

Another test, though with less movement, is just to move left or right a space, causing the whole desktop contents to slide to one side.

 

Performing these actions is usually fast and fluid for me, even with an in-browser video playing on one screen.  But now and then it will stutter just a little.

 

It's been long enough since I used a real Mac that I have no idea if such micro-lags are unusual or not.  Maybe a real Mac would do the same with 4 x monitors and a full screen video playing?   Actually it's five monitors now, because I've added my iPad as an extra screen using Duet.  And when I did have a real Mac, I never used it with more than three screens total, and never with a 4K screen as I have now.  So I'm pushing this Hack more than I ever did a real Mac - though the Hack also has superior hardware versus my last Mac, the early-2013 MacBook Pro with NVidia 650M.

 

So from what you and others have said, I'm thinking I'm not getting the sort of lag you guys are seeing.  Even when I get stuttering, it's not nearly bad enough to stop me working. 

 

That one exception I mentioned, the only recent time I have had really bad lag, was when I was playing about in Final Cut Pro, adding multiple effects to a sample video. I had my usual full screen video playing on another screen.  At one point as I scrolled through the FCP video, everything suddenly froze for a good minute or so, including the mouse pointer.  However audio from the YouTube video continued.  It did recover, but took long enough that I wondered if maybe it wasn't going to come back. 

 

This might be an instance of very bad stutter, or maybe it's just Final Cut Pro being flaky; again, I don't know what a real Mac would do in this situation.  And I've never used FCP before, so I have no prior experience of its performance.  But it does seem unlikely that a real Mac would get into a all-screens-frozen-for-over-a-minute situation when using Apple's own video editing software.

[ReddestDream]

Out of interest, can you describe the nature and severity of the lags you see?

 

I'm still using my 760 but I've been back on the Web drivers since 159 came out.   I do sometimes see little lags, but definitely nothing that I would describe as preventing me from getting work done (with one isolated exception, described below, when I was experimenting in Final Cut Pro.)

 

I think a good test of general desktop performance is opening Mission Control.  I use BetterTouchTool to map multiple gestures to my Magic Trackpad, and I have a three-finger-swipe-upwards assigned to "Mission Control & immediately show desktop preview".  This simultaneously opens Mission Control and also expands the row of Desktops at the top, allowing immediate dragging of windows to any Space/Desktop. Having this on a gesture lets me open it quickly and easily at any time, and I do it frequently.

 

I think this is a good test of lag because it causes all windows on all screens to resize and move, as well as animating the expansion of the desktop row at top.  So it's quite a lot of movement at once.  

 

Another test, though with less movement, is just to move left or right a space, causing the whole desktop contents to slide to one side.

 

Performing these actions is usually fast and fluid for me, even with an in-browser video playing on one screen.  But now and then it will stutter just a little.

 

It's been long enough since I used a real Mac that I have no idea if such micro-lags are unusual or not.  Maybe a real Mac would do the same with 4 x monitors and a full screen video playing?   Actually it's five monitors now, because I've added my iPad as an extra screen using Duet.  And when I did have a real Mac, I never used it with more than three screens total, and never with a 4K screen as I have now.  So I'm pushing this Hack more than I ever did a real Mac - though the Hack also has superior hardware versus my last Mac, the early-2013 MacBook Pro with NVidia 650M.

 

So from what you and others have said, I'm thinking I'm not getting the sort of lag you guys are seeing.  Even when I get stuttering, it's not nearly bad enough to stop me working. 

 

That one exception I mentioned, the only recent time I have had really bad lag, was when I was playing about in Final Cut Pro, adding multiple effects to a sample video. I had my usual full screen video playing on another screen.  At one point as I scrolled through the FCP video, everything suddenly froze for a good minute or so, including the mouse pointer.  However audio from the YouTube video continued.  It did recover, but took long enough that I wondered if maybe it wasn't going to come back. 

 

This might be an instance of very bad stutter, or maybe it's just Final Cut Pro being flaky; again, I don't know what a real Mac would do in this situation.  And I've never used FCP before, so I have no prior experience of its performance.  But it does seem unlikely that a real Mac would get into a all-screens-frozen-for-over-a-minute situation when using Apple's own video editing software.

 

The issue appears to be CPU Generation-dependent (Mostly affecting Skylake and newer). What CPU do you have in this hack that you say is not lagging?

[TheBloke]

The issue appears to be CPU Generation-dependent (Mostly affecting Skylake and newer). What CPU do you have in this hack that you say is not lagging?

 

Old: Westmere generation, Intel X5670 (X58 architecture).  So yeah that would definitely explain it then.

[ReddestDream]

So, I was reading and some MBP owners have also had Nvidia lag on High Sierra:

 

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/any-news-about-the-macbook-pro-nvidia-gpu-lag-yet.2088300/page-6

 

Some users there are also reporting that the 104 Web driver is the best driver they've had too . . .

 

[TheBloke]

 

So, I was reading and some MBP owners have also had Nvidia lag on High Sierra:

 

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/any-news-about-the-macbook-pro-nvidia-gpu-lag-yet.2088300/page-6

 

Some users there are also reporting that the 104 Web driver is the best driver they've had too . . .

 

 

 

Well that's good - it won't get fixed unless it affects 'official' users. 

 

So 104 is better than 106?  It was 106 I was using before I went to the latest 159, that's what the nvidia-update shell script installs by default.

 

Though maybe it doesn't matter for me if I'm not getting the big issue anyway.

[ReddestDream]

Well that's good - it won't get fixed unless it affects 'official' users. 

 

So 104 is better than 106?  It was 106 I was using before I went to the latest 159, that's what the nvidia-update shell script installs by default.

 

Though maybe it doesn't matter for me if I'm not getting the big issue anyway.

 

AFAIK, 104, 105, and 106 are identical save for the changed build number for iMac Pro.

 

Also, 158 and 159 are only different by build number too.

[LockDown]

Also, 158 and 159 are only different by build number too.

Sure?

[ReddestDream]

Sure?

 

Feel free to check and confirm. They were released so close together, I can't imagine it's otherwise. Nvidia starting doing iMac Pro builds because someone filed a request for it . . .

[Fergarth]

VoodooHDA has strange audio lag/stuttering and is far inferior to native HDAudio.

Yes I also prefer Native HD Audio, but I do not have any lag in the sound with voodoo! In fact, I do not even notice a difference, since I always edit the output levels of voodoo in the plist so that they have a similar output to AppleHDA.

About Web Driver, 159 is working fine on my system as expected! No lag!

[Cyberdevs]

@TheBloke 

 

 

Well the main lags are appearing in the macOS UI, Dock, Safari and while switching between windows specially when I minimize them to the dock and vise versa.

 

I've been using macOS for many years on many computers (Macs and Hacks) but ever since macOS High Sierra came out the overall experience is really bad in my view (even on Apple Computers).

 

I've been using AMD GPUs for a long time and whit the "Black Screen" issue on macOS Sierra I decided to switch to nVidia and it was a pretty good experience at the time.

 

Short after, @Mieze found a solution to solve the problem on AMDs GPU (Booting to black screen).

 

Last night I've been thinking that the same thing might possibly be used to solve the lags on nVidia GPUs. I'm thinking that using a SSDT for nVidia GPUs might be useful to address the issue on the current problem.

 

I have to investigate more in the matter to see wether it can help solve the problem or not.

 

The base for this conclusion is on the fact that the lags are happening mostly on 100, 200 and the 300 series (SkyLake and newer architecture).

 

If anyone has a suggestion and/or can test my hypothesis please let me know how it worked out.

 

Cheers

[camillionario]

 

I can confirm that with 10.13.3 (17D102) and driver 158, I do not have lags in webGL.
I've updated from sierra and the graphics very well so far. The installation has been without DSDT in Patch, only SSDT for sound, USB, graphics, CPU and Bluetooth.
I can say that in this way I have not had lags in the graphics, while using DSDT yes.

 

 

[brousseau6933]

Waiting for my High Sierra partition test to install: curious to see if there is any improvements in Cinebench OpenGL. Last time I tried (from .104 to .156), I had 20 fps lower than 10.12.6 with my GTX 950.

 

I'm on Haswell Refresh i7 4790 and GA Z97-UD3H for the record.

 

Answering to myself: Cinebench the same on my Dell Optiplex 9020 and GT 1030 (75 fps) but definitely 15 to 20 fps lower than Sierra with the Maxwell GTX 950. Anyone has Cinebench comparison between Sierra and HS for Maxwell?

 

Thanks,

 

Patrice

[Cyberdevs]

Answering to myself: Cinebench the same on my Dell Optiplex 9020 and GT 1030 (75 fps) but definitely 15 to 20 fps lower than Sierra with the Maxwell GTX 950. Anyone has Cinebench comparison between Sierra and HS for Maxwell?

 

Thanks,

 

Patrice

I guess with the last macOS update (10.13.3) and with the latest supplemental update the drop in performance is unavoidable, they had to issue the Meltdown and the Spectre bugs which definitely took a toll on the performance of the CPU and the GPU.

[MaLd0n]

158 is good, no lags

 

 

I can confirm that with 10.13.3 (17D102) and driver 158, I do not have lags in webGL.
I've updated from sierra and the graphics very well so far. The installation has been without DSDT in Patch, only SSDT for sound, USB, graphics, CPU and Bluetooth.
I can say that in this way I have not had lags in the graphics, while using DSDT yes.

 

Captura de pantalla 2018-02-25 a las 20.32.34.png

 

DSDT/SSDT is for the best hackintosh experience

 

if the opposite happens to you, something wrong

[TheBloke]

The issue appears to be CPU Generation-dependent (Mostly affecting Skylake and newer). What CPU do you have in this hack that you say is not lagging?

The base for this conclusion is on the fact that the lags are happening mostly on 100, 200 and the 300 series (SkyLake and newer architecture).

I have now also found that the issue is noticeably worse with a later gen Maxwell NVidia card.  Or rather, for me the issue exists in my Maxwell card where it mostly did not in my Kepler.

 

I spent the last week or so using my old 760, originally to test Native but I carried on with Web 159 for a couple of days. 

 

Today I got around to reverting back to my 980Ti, and within minutes of booting I could see things were noticeably laggy again.

 

Moving left/right a space mostly still smooth, as is Minimising/Restoring a window to Dock.  But "open mission control & display desktop previews" was noticeably slower. And everything just feels.. lagged. Like even clicking into a window on another monitor sometimes seems to take a moment before it registers.

 

My ever-present full-screen YouTube video is once again regularly skipping frames when I perform actions elsewhere, like activating browser tabs in other windows (when it causes a screen re-draw), and sometimes when moving left/right a space on a different screen. And there's often a noticeable lag when I hit the "full screen" button on a YouTube video which wasn't there before.

 

I also find graphics are using more CPU. For example, that YouTube video was for a while showing 50-60% of a CPU in VTDecoderXPCService, macOS' video rendering daemon  Before it was 30-40%.   Also quite noticeable is that I am often seeing WindowServer towards the top of Activity Monitor's CPU list, sometimes as high as 35%. I don't ever remember seeing that regularly before.

 

As a result, Activity Monitor is showing my "Idle" as 88-90% as I type this. Before I reverted I was seeing 95+%, with exactly the same apps/tabs open. Not a huge difference, but there shouldn't be any difference. If there was no lag then it wouldn't matter, but as it stands this is another symptom.

 

Therefore I think that separate from CPU issues, there's also a GPU difference: if you have a Maxwell card you may well have a worse experience than Kepler and prior. Which sucks.

 

Later update:

 

I then tried going to driver 106, and from boot things seemed a bit better.  And mostly they have remained a little better  -  Mission Control has mostly been smooth, and while playing a video I'm not seeing such high CPU, though I do see WindowServer averaging around 9%.  But it's clearly still not right, as occasionally I get massive judders, and once again the YouTube video is very easily skipped by any other graphical activity on the system.  And trying to scroll a Facebook tab in Firefox was terrible, major juddering on every scroll.

 

I'm going to stick with this GPU for another 12-24 hours, if for no other reason than it's hassle switching GPU again.  I'll continue seeing how it performs on both 106 and 158/159, and see if anything at all can improve it.

 

But it seems most likely that I will have to go back to the NV 760, because this level of lag is annoying.  It sucks to use a mid-level 2013 graphics card when I have a high-end 2017 card gathering dust.  I even briefly thought about selling it.   But I will want to play games in Windows again at some point, so I guess I'm stuck with this two-GPU situation unless the drivers/macOS ever fix this issue.

 

Unless I sold the 980Ti to buy an AMD RX580.  But that's a pretty big downgrade from the 980Ti, and I think isn't even really capable of 4K in games.   And the RX Vega cards are far too expensive.

[TheBloke]

I tried the 980Ti for a day and it was horrible.  I'm back on the 760 (with NV drivers 158) and the difference is night and day. 

 

Besides the obvious screen lag, the problems were clearly obvious and quantifiable by looking at CPU usage:  playing a full-screen video on one screen while typing this, with three Firefox windows wih a dozen or so tabs, plus Path Finder, Activity Monitor, HWMonitor and a few iTerm 2 windows, my Idle is 94-95%, where before it was 85-90%.   VTDecoderXPCService is using 15% CPU to decode the video, where with the Maxwell card it was 30-60%.  WindowServer is still always visible towards the top of Activity Monitor (I guess it always was and I didn't notice before), but it's averaging 5% instead of 9+%.  

 

Window operations are again smooth, in particular Mission Control  and left/right a space.  Sometimes these operations do cause a slight pause in the playing full-screen video, but it's just for the duration of the screen operation; there's no continued frame skip/juddering of the video after the operation, as there was before.  And it doesn't skip as a result of normal operations like clicking around in other windows or activating other Firefox tabs.

 

So my experience is that Maxwell cards are bust   Those drivers must be really bad to cause a knock-on effect of high CPU in processes accessing the displays.  I guess I will make a post on the NVidia forums, but I have no hope of it doing any good any time soon.

[levifig]

 

But it seems most likely that I will have to go back to the NV 760, because this level of lag is annoying.

 

 

FWIW, I'm running a 770 and I get the lag…

[ReddestDream]

@TheBloke

 

 

Well the main lags are appearing in the macOS UI, Dock, Safari and while switching between windows specially when I minimize them to the dock and vise versa.

 

I've been using macOS for many years on many computers (Macs and Hacks) but ever since macOS High Sierra came out the overall experience is really bad in my view (even on Apple Computers).

 

I've been using AMD GPUs for a long time and whit the "Black Screen" issue on macOS Sierra I decided to switch to nVidia and it was a pretty good experience at the time.

 

Short after, @Mieze found a solution to solve the problem on AMDs GPU (Booting to black screen).

 

Last night I've been thinking that the same thing might possibly be used to solve the lags on nVidia GPUs. I'm thinking that using a SSDT for nVidia GPUs might be useful to address the issue on the current problem.

 

I have to investigate more in the matter to see wether it can help solve the problem or not.

 

The base for this conclusion is on the fact that the lags are happening mostly on 100, 200 and the 300 series (SkyLake and newer architecture).

 

If anyone has a suggestion and/or can test my hypothesis please let me know how it worked out.

 

Cheers

I don't think the Nvidia lag is anything like the AMD black screen issue, which was an issue with the init state the macOS AMD drivers expect the card to be in. Fixes like WhateverGreen and RadeonDeInit work by putting the card in the state the driver expects.

 

In fact, Linux users are also having lag issues with their latest Nvidia driver, so I think Nvidia just dropped the ball somewhere internally, maybe with the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, and didn't test properly or didn't have time on non-Windows OSes. Like the macOS drivers, the Linux drivers are also tied to particular kernel versions and people are modding the older drivers to work on newer kernels in the meantime:

 

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=234241

 

In fact this is all so bad, I've been tempted to try to put my old RX 480 in alongside my 1080ti and only use the 1080ti in Windows . . .

[Cyberdevs]

I don't think the Nvidia lag is anything like the AMD black screen issue, which was an issue with the init state the macOS AMD drivers expect the card to be in. Fixes like WhateverGreen and RadeonDeInit work by putting the card in the state the driver expects.

 

In fact, Linux users are also having lag issues with their latest Nvidia driver, so I think Nvidia just dropped the ball somewhere internally, maybe with the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, and didn't test properly or didn't have time on non-Windows OSes. Like the macOS drivers, the Linux drivers are also tied to particular kernel versions and people are modding the older drivers to work on newer kernels in the meantime:

 

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=234241

 

In fact this is all so bad, I've been tempted to try to put my old RX 480 in alongside my 1080ti and only use the 1080ti in Windows . . .

I know that the boot to black screen issue on AMD GPUs is totally another story, what I meant by that statement was based on the fact that almost all the system prior to 100 chipset are working without the lag. So that got me thinking that it must have been related to way that the BIOS is addressing the GPU and this is beside the fact that it might have been totally related to the web drivers themselves. This was just a hunch!

 

I assure you if you use your RX 480 just for few minuted you will see the difference between the AMD and nVidia (only if you suffer from the lag on nVidia as well).

 

My 7790 1GB (an ancient GPU in comparison to my 1070) is performing much better as if I just upgraded from a 8086 pc to modern one

FWIW, I'm running a 770 and I get the lag…

You are not alone brother! We all have the lag with the nVidia GPUs!

[TheBloke]

Having said that it's much better on my 760.. well, it is better than the 980Ti.  But it's certainly not fixed.

Since yesterday I've been using Lightroom and Photoshop and that's re-introduced lots more lag.  Just having Photoshop open as I have now, with a video playing on another screen, and performance is very variable. Sometimes OK, sometimes noticeable stutters on things like Mission Control (MC).   Last night was even worse - MC sometimes taking a couple of seconds before it fully animated. 

 

This is frustrating because I use Mission Control a lot as a window switcher - rather than Alt or Command Tab, I swipe three fingers upwards on the trackpad which activates MC and I can see all windows in the current space side by side.  If it's fast this is a great way to choose another window, especially if I haven't used it recently.  But only if it's fast.

 

I don't think this is general system slowness, because Activity Monitor shows the system at 85+% idle, and I've got plenty of free RAM.

 

And in fact just now I was in a position where I couldn't full-screen a sports video in Firefox, on a site that uses Adobe Flash, without it suttering horribly.  I had to close and re-open the tab and site before it worked OK.  It shouldn't be like this.

 

So as discussed in other threads, I'm now seriously considering going AMD instead.  If I get confirmation that I can use all five or six outputs on an AMD EyeFinity card, I'll definitely sell this 760 and get a 7970 instead.   (I also noticed that Photoshop won't let me enable Metal acceleration with my current NVidia.  I don't know exactly why as other apps seem to use Metal OK.  But I'm hoping this might work better with AMD.)

 

 

 

Last night I've been thinking that the same thing might possibly be used to solve the lags on nVidia GPUs. I'm thinking that using a SSDT for nVidia GPUs might be useful to address the issue on the current problem.

 

You mentioned SSDTs also in my thread, with regard to AMD cards.  Could you elaborate on this?

 

I had thought SSDTs were only related to SpeedStep and power management?  Is that not correct?  Or do you think our issues are related to power management somehow - interfering with the graphics somehow?

 

I did notice that when I had my 980Ti in, according to HWMonitor it either ran at 900Mhz or 1100Mhz.  Whereas the max speed of the card is 1350Mhz, and that's what I'd see it maxing at in Windows.   I wasn't sure if that was a reporting/monitoring error, or if the card was really never using its full performace.

 

Not that that should explain the lag - a 980Ti at 1100mhz should be capable of doing normal UI animations dozens of times over!