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

Also, since I first posted this thread, I was once again in a situation where, with the bug happening, screen recording with QuickTime Player was no longer possible. (It looked like it was recording, but then no movie file was created after I stopped the recording.) I then tried recording the screen with CleanShot X, and I actually got a KERNEL PANIC. The panic log is very long (3 MB) and I won't try posting it here since I don't know what Apple allows me to post, but here's the beginning of it, in case it means anything to anyone:

Another time, CleanShot X was also unable to record, but instead of KP-ing, it gave me the following error messages:

Normally, when the bug is not occurring, CleanShot X is able to create screen recordings just fine (just like QuickTime Player).

I can assure you that my home office and working conditions are extremely stable and that there is nothing that would explain why a hardware problem that hasn't manifested itself for several days would all of a sudden decide to manifest itself out of the blue with no obvious trigger.

On the other hand, in my experience, while OS X / macOS has always been a very stable system, it also has always had software problems that eventually manifested themselves after several weeks of uptime and could only be solved by a reboot. The problem here is that, instead of WEEKS of reliable uptime, I now only have DAYS, and that the issues that manifest themselves are far from being small marginal details that can be ignored. Once the issues start occurring, I really have no option but to reboot.

That being said, I did go ahead and ran Hardware Diagnostics. (As usual, Apple's instructions about this are woefully incomplete and I couldn't get cmd-D to work until I actually first *clicked on one of the icons* on the recovery startup screen. Apple makes no mention of a need to first click on something before hitting cmd-D. And of course it takes a LONG time to actually connect to the wireless mouse to begin with, so you cannot click until you can. I don't know if the Mac in this state eventually connected to the wireless keyboard. I just plugged in a wired keyboard instead, because I was pressing cmd-D and nothing was happening — until I clicked on something first.)

The Hardware Diagnostics verdict is clear: Everything is in working order. I got the "no issues found" code (ADP000).

The test gave me a chance to actually hear the Mac Pro's fans ramping up, which I have never heard in real life since my use of the Mac never actually taxes the hardware in any major way.

So Hardware Diagnostics says: nothing to report. Thanks just the same for suggesting I go through that step, as it will give me a ready answer if anyone at Apple actually suggests this (which they have yet to do themselves, even after so many HOURS of back-and-forth over the phone).

My instinct as an experienced troubleshooter remains that this IS a software bug, in macOS itself, and involving this specific hardware configuration, which explains why it's not more widespread. But I still find it pretty much impossible to believe that I am the only one seeing this.

In case you are interested, here's a screen recording I made of the problem happening in Affinity Photo 2, with the simple PNG image file failing to display in the app until I turn Hardware Acceleration off and relaunch:

This is just one particular symptom of the problem. (At the same time, Preview fails to resize an HEIC file properly, image2icns fails to display the same PNG file when I open it there, etc. See all the symptoms listed above.)

Quitting Safari temporarily clears the problem, and then it comes back after a while. Rebooting (usually) clears the problem for several days.

As for experimenting with possible hardware fixes (notwithstanding the fact that Hardware Diagnostics says that nothing is wrong), I might be willing in theory, but the closest Apple Store is a two-hour drive away, so it's not something that I can undertake on a dime. And since the problem only (usually) manifests itself SEVERAL DAYS after a reboot, there would be no way to check on the spot in the Apple Store if the swap made a difference. Again, I repeat: I do not know of a way to deliberately TRIGGER the problem.

It still seems far more likely to me that this is a software bug, and surely there are software things that can be tried in order to narrow down the issue and possibly find a way to trigger it reproducibly. I “just” need to find an Apple engineer who might be open to this and have ideas or suggestions. So far, no luck. Hence my desperation. (And I've just spent another hour doing this and writing this report.)

[Edited by Moderator]

What I have also found ON MY OWN, with the help of some other users, is that, in Affinity Photo 2, under Settings > Performance, there is an option to turn the Mac Pro’s Hardware Acceleration off in Affinity Photo 2 itself. In order for the change to take effect, the app has to be relaunched. But after I make the change and relaunch the app, the app is again able to display the images juste fine, even as all the other apps that I am using (Preview, Pixelmator Pro, images2icns) are still unable to display them and all the other problems are still happening. And as soon as I turn Hardware Acceleration back on and relaunch Affinity Photo 2 again, it becomes unable to display images again.

So this clearly suggests that there is a bug in macOS involving hardware acceleration, which only starts occurring after several days of uptime. Unfortunately, there is no way that I know to turn hardware acceleration off system-wide. The only such option that I am aware of is the one in Affinity Photo 2.

As indicated, Apple have asked me to do all kinds of things. I have wasted countless hours doing stuff that they asked me to do that has made NO difference. I recently upgraded to Sonoma (14.1) to see if it would help. It hasn't. The problem happened again less than 24 hours after I did the upgrade from Ventura to Sonoma. (I hope it's not going to be even more frequent in Sonoma!) 

I have captured numerous screen shots and have made several video recordings of the problems AS THEY ARE HAPPENING. (In fact, at some point, the problem was so bad that even video recording itself no longer worked. Thankfully, so far this has only happened once, and I have been able to save several very clear recordings of the problems.)

In other words, AppleCare has been completely unhelpful so far. I have found a responsive senior advisor who's following the case, but he keeps asking me to do things that the engineers ask him to ask me to do that clearly have NOTHING to do with the problem (disable old extensions for things that I don't even use anymore and that have nothing to do with graphics, etc.). Nothing that they have asked me to try has made ANY difference. The latest request coming from the engineers is that I try to reproduce the problem WITHOUT using ANY third-party software. How on earth am I supposed to be able to do that? I cannot do any work without using third-party software. This is ridiculous and I am at my wits’ end.

I cannot quite believe that I am the only one experiencing this problem. Surely there are other M2 Ultra Mac Pro users out there who are encountering the same problem. But I cannot find them. Are there any forums that anyone could recommend where I might find follow Mac Pro users who might have more insights/tips? Is there anyone here who might be able to help? I am desperate. I cannot quite believe I have spent so much money on a Mac and that there is such an obvious bug and no one seems to be willing or able to do anything about it.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

2/2

A hardware problem that would only manifest itself after several days of uptime would be rather unusual. I suppose it cannot be entirely ruled out and I will try to run the hardware diagnostics when I get the chance. (Not holding my breath, though.)

I didn't say it “failed once in Preview”. This keeps happening again and again. As I explained in my post, I do not know that the trigger for it is. I don't know what causes macOS to start acting up like this all of a sudden. So no, of course, I do not have a “simple case with Preview”. If I did, I probably wouldn't be here. But Preview is most definitely affected, in a very obvious way. And that's not a third-party app. Neither is FaceTime. Neither are all the Apple apps where the buttons are suddenly no longer visible.

I am not asking the engineers to debug third-party software. I am asking them to provide me with targeted tests or protocols that can indeed help determine whether there is indeed (as the behaviour in Affinity Photo 2 seems to suggest) a problem involving hardware acceleration, which somehow manifests itself in all these different problems. In other words, I am asking them to pay attention to the details of my reports and consider that somehow hardware acceleration seems to be involved, instead of focusing on third-party software as if it were the root of all evil. It's like they cannot even countenance the idea that macOS itself might have a bug, whereas all the evidence so far suggests that there is one.

Thanks for sharing. May I ask whether the main reason you think our problems might have something in common is that it's Apple Silicon, it's graphics-related and it's gotten worse with the upgrade to Sonoma, or whether there are other commonalities — and, if it's the latter, what those might be?

Thanks for clarifying.

I agree with you that there are enough similarities: Apple Silicon, graphics issues, use of external display (multiple displays in my case), more than one user logged in, Quit Safari trick as temporary fix. In fact, on more than one occasion, I did notice that it seemed like it was precisely the second user logging in that caused macOS to fall over the edge, so to speak, and start acting up. (Needless to say, I've tried reproducing the bug by doing just that, logging in a second user, and running FaceTime in both, and running Preview in both, on a clean macOS install, but to no avail. It takes more than just those things, but it looks like it takes at least those things.)

One thing that I've definitely noticed is that, once macOS starts acting up, if I am having trouble editing pictures in Preview in my main user environment, with error messages claiming Preview's inability to "autosave", the situation is even worse in the other user environment, where opening images in Preview directly results in a blank window (even before attempting to resize them).

The fact that the problem, once it starts occurring, manifests itself thusly, in more than one user environment simultaneously, is also a fairly strong indication that it's likely to be a macOS bug, and not a conflict with a third-party app that might affect the entire OS. (It remains possible, but rather unlikely.)

The big problem that remains is that I/we do not have a way to trigger this bug on demand. It just starts happening at some point, with no clear trigger. And until we do, it's really hard to get any support from Apple.

UPDATE: After I created a clean install of macOS as per Apple's instructions, without migrating anything from an existing volume, and then only reinstalled those apps that are really essential to my work, I was able to trigger the bug.

For the record, this process enabled me to narrow down the list of possible suspects as per the following:

INSTALLED BEFORE BUG RECURRENCE:

- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams)

- Bitwarden

- Authy

- Downie (standalone app)

- Mona

- LaunchBar

- Google Chrome

- Acrobat Reader

- FoxTrot Pro Search

- Antidote

- Nisus Writer Pro

- Typinator

- Keyboard Maestro

- Numbers

- Pages

- Swinsian

- Plex Media Server + Plex app

- DVDpedia, Musicpedia, Bookpedia, Gamepedia (require Rosetta)

NOT SUSPECT SINCE THEY WERE ONLY INSTALLED AFTER THE BUG RECURRENCE:

- Setapp apps (CleanShot, Forklift, Bartender, Nitro PDF Pro, BusyCal, BusyContacts, Archiver, iStat Menus, image2icon, CleanMyMac X, HazeOver, etc.)

- Default Folder X

- SmoothScroll

- Elgato Stream Deck

- Firefox

- all Safari extensions (StopTheMadness, Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Homecoming for Mastodon)

- all Rogue Amoeba apps (Audio Hijack, SoundSource, Loopback)

- XLD

- Replacicon

- pCalc

- Affinity apps

- Pixelmator Pro

- Logic Pro

- MusicHarbor

- Ninox

- Play

- IINA

- Maestral

It is pretty much impossible for me to function without the first batch of apps for any length of time. It's a bit of a Catch-22, because I cannot reproduce what I normally do with my Mac without those apps, but Apple is asking me to try reproducing the bug without using those apps.

As indicated above, at the prompting of another contributor to this discussion, I did run the Hardware Diagnostics on this Mac Pro, and it ended with the code "ADP000 No Issues Found". Are you saying this panic log suggests that there IS a hardware issue? (I don't know how to read panic logs. I don't know how to tell if they indicate a software issue or a hardware issue.) This panic log was submitted to Apple five days ago. They have yet to get back to me saying it's a hardware issue. They might not even have looked at it yet.

When I wrote, "This panic log was submitted to Apple five days ago", I actually meant that it was manually submitted by me to the AppleCare Senior Advisor who has been dealing with my case from the beginning, and that, according to him, it has been submitted to the “engineers”, hopefully in a way that will make them examine it carefully and soon.

The last time I talked to him (two days ago), he said that it might take some time. Obviously what feels urgent to me doesn't feel as urgent to them. I've already been dealing with this situation for five months now. I guess that, as annoying as it is, I have to be more patient.

I chose to add this information here in this thread since it's relevant to the ongoing investigation. Your response makes me somewhat hopeful that we might finally be onto something, which would be a significant relief. The real relief, however, will obviously be when I no longer have to live with this bug on a daily basis.