[SOLVED] Low fps after switch from dedicated to integrated card on Mac

Hi There,

I’m seeing an issue on a playcanvas project where after about 5 seconds my framerate tanks from 60 ish to 20 ish. Looking at the GPU History graph on MacOS, I can see at the moment the framerate ducks, the graphics workload shifts from the dedicated card to the integrated card.

I can repo this (the graphics card switching behaviour) on a default new project.

Interestingly, this problem doesn’t present on the playcanvas samples, e.g. the Graphics Demo - only utilises the dedicated graphics card, and never switches to the integrated card.

Is there a setting I can change anywhere in the editor that disables or forces PC to only run on the dedicated GFX card if available?

Running on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) - R560X

Thanks!

Matt

You can try changing the power setting to high power to see if that makes a difference in Project Settings → Rendering but besides that, we don’t do anything specific to keep it on the dedicated card

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@mvaligursky Do you know anything about this?

That sorted it! Thanks :slight_smile:

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If you don’t use High Performance, than browsers are free to use low powered GPU to render. Apple engineers said this was ignored till Safari 15 - and they’ve now started to use this flag. I’m not sure about other browsers.

We’ve changed this setting to default to High Performance for both the engine and the new Editor projects few months ago as well for this reason. For existing projects, users might need to set this up if needed.

I don’t believe the default setting is applying correctly then, as I made a new project to test this, and it exhibits the graphics switching behaviour, so I assume ‘default’ is still Low Power right now

You’re correct, we’ve concluded this yesterday as well. Here’s the ticket to track the fix:

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