System-wide hardware acceleration bug in macOS on M2 Ultra Mac Pro? (1/2)

I got a M2 Ultra Mac Pro back in June 2023. While I was using Monterey on my 2020 Mac Pro, the new model forced me to upgrade to Ventura. Ever since then, I have been experiencing a cluster of problems that I still haven’t been able to get Apple to investigate properly and address. Instead, they have asked me to do all kinds of troubleshooting that I just KNOW is totally unrelated and won’t make any difference. (It doesn’t.)

I am at my wits’ end.

Here is what’s going on.

After a few days of uptime, I start noticing various image-related problems in all kinds of apps, including macOS Preview itself, but also numerous third-party apps, such as Affinity Photo 2, Pixelmator Pro, image2icns, CleanShot X, etc.

These apps have trouble editing images or even simply DISPLAYING them. If I open a HEIC pic that I took with my iPhone in Preview, it looks fine, but when I go to Tools > Adjust Size…, as soon as the dialog appears, several gray blocks cover parts of the picture in the background. And once I change the size to, say, 1000 pixels wide, instead of resizing the picture, Preview displays… a blank window with nothing in it. If I save that, I end up with a saved picture of a blank.

The problem sometimes gets even worse and Preview is not even able to display the picture at all, let alone resize it.

If I try to open the exact same picture in Affinity Photo 2 or Pixelmator, the app opens a document window, but where the picture should be there is nothing but a checkboard pattern, as if the picture was just a big empty frame with nothing in it. (QuickLook in the Finder still shows the original picture just fine.)

If I try to open a small picture file in image2icns to turn it into an icon, instead of displaying the image, images2icns too just displays a blank checkerboard pattern, as if the picture was just a transparent square of nothing.

If I try to edit a screen shot in CleanShot X, CleanShot displays the screen shot, but several of the editing tools fail to work properly. The tool to blur the selection fails to blur. The tool to draw a red rectangle fails to draw anything. Etc.

If I try to use FaceTime to call someone, they get my call and can take it, but they don’t see me and they don’t hear me. I see them, but I don’t hear them. (Other videoconferencing apps continue to work fine.)

If I bring up a dialog in an app like Apple’s own Podcasts app, the buttons in the dialog box are INVISIBLE, unless I leave the dialog box open and switch to another app, and then the buttons appear in their background state. But in their foreground state they are invisible. This affects several apps, both Apple’s own (Music, TV, etc.) and third-party apps. I don’t have a complete list of all the apps that are affected.

Meanwhile, all kinds of other apps continue to work just fine. I can work in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Pages, etc. Other than the buttons sometimes not displaying properly in some of the dialogs, things work OK. Videoconferencing with other platforms (Teams, Zoom, etc.) works fine.

At this stage, if I reboot my Mac Pro, everything goes back to normal, and I get several new days of uptime with no problems, until the same issues start happening again.

I have yet to be able to identify a trigger. I just start noticing that things don’t work properly anymore, either when I try to resize a picture in Preview, or when I bring up a dialog box and the buttons don’t show, etc. I have no way to tell how long before then the problems started happening again.

I have been in touch with AppleCare and they have had me try a number of things. For example, we’ve found that if I quit all currently running apps (just bring up the Force Quit dialog box and select all and force-quit all), without logging out or rebooting, things also go back to normal as well (for a while).

We’ve also found that, once macOS start acting up like this, if I just quit ONE app or two, like Safari or Chrome, things SEEM to go back to normal (images show again, buttons look normal again, etc.)… except that they don’t really. I can relaunch the apps I just quit and continue to work for a little while, but soon enough all the symptoms start resurfacing. (Sometimes it’s only some of the symptoms described above. Sometimes it’s all of them.) The only way to make them go for a good while is to reboot or quit all apps and relaunch them one by one.

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