Vivaldi Helper Requires High Performance GPU
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@mstrz Everybody's situation is different. However, in most cases, you're still better off using the external GPU for compositing, rendering and video decoding than you are offloading those tasks to the main CPU.
I've passed on the general observation to the Vivaldi team that Chrome seems to be more power-efficient and battery-friendly. I don't know what optimizations can be made but the Vivaldi developers are smart people.
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@mstrz Everybody's situation is different. However, in most cases, you're still better off using the external GPU for compositing, rendering and video decoding than you are offloading those tasks to the main CPU.
but Integrated GPU is not CPU, it's GPU. Just a less power-hog one.
I've passed on the general observation to the Vivaldi team that Chrome seems to be more power-efficient and battery-friendly. I don't know what optimizations can be made but the Vivaldi developers are smart people.
Actually MacOS could be enforced to use Integrated GPU, even with current version of Vivaldi – just select "Integrated only" in gfxCardStatus.app BEFORE launching the app that locks on Discrete GPU.
This method helped me with other apps (Chrome, Slack) before they fixed that GPU issue. But this feature is not quite stable and could lead to failures, so it's better to fix the app.
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@apocryphal I have seen it for a while also, when Opera switched to Chromium I saw the same thing.
Open Vivaldi Intel GPU is used (Hardware acceleration on and discrete GPU is forced), when PPAPI Flash Player is used discrete GPU is forced (I think it it partly the buggy PPAPI plug in on macOS, PPAPI has the performance I saw of NPAPI on Macs 10 years ago).
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Hurray!
If I wasn't day dreaming they fixed it with Vivaldi 2.0. -
@reach3r It did start not forcing it but then it did later (no video site just text).
macOS 10.14 here
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@dshintag Not sure if this works anymore (and I don't have a dual-GPU Mac to test with) but it used to be possible (using the macOS pmset utility from the command line) to set a power management profile so that the MacBook Pro uses the integrated GPU while on battery power. The option isn't documented but searching for
pmset "gpuswitch 0"
finds quite a few discussions on this topic.https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/set-gpu-behaviour-base-on-power-source.2136367/
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At least with Nvidia GPUs I noticed Apple introduced a regression bug in 10.13, it is still in 10.14 as of 10.14.5 (have reported it to Apple), when on the Intel GPU it is much more stable.
This is the Opera setting for the dedicated GPU (Opera is more stable with this setting (at least with a dedicated Nvidia GPU & integrated Intel GPU)
I did ask Opera how they did that but have not heard back.
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@Chas4 I don't know what Opera does either. A macOS application can use I/O Kit to assert specific power management settings. If they did it this way, you'll see the assertion when you run
pmset -g assertions
while Opera is running.The only other way that I can think of doing this is by internally "blacklisting" the discrete GPU so that the Chromium code will not use it.
I've pointed out both of these potential options internally.
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I've filled a bug-report for this and just now noticed the forum post: VB-58500
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Half a year later. I recently observed problems with rendering some videos on vivaldi on Mac (Macbookpro 13" with touch bar - I wasn't even quite aware it has double GPU, as a matter of fact I don't know if it has and I'm too lazy to check how to check).
Back to the point: on some videos it stutters, shows green pixels, or even green stripes on lower half of video, the fan (or blower) is spinning like crazy and the video is... well, not watchable. It is actually quite new - I use this mac for some time now and it wasn't so bad before - so maybe it's because of some update (?), maybe after the bug report (?)
Anyway, I will let it here just for info.
In the meantime I changed
"Use hardware acceleration when available" to OFF
in the settings tab/window (just look for "hardware" in settings) and it seems to work better. At least at the first try. -
Please fix this one, it's really annoying.
I have a Macbook pro 2019 and while turning off hardware acceleration somewhat improves the fan noise, the videos are noticeably lower FPS than before. I had to turn on hardware acceleration again. -