Hi, I recently received a 16" MacBook Pro base model (i7 9750H, radeon 5300m 4gb, 16gb RAM) from my school and I've noticed that in a lot of use cases, especially Chrome, there is a lot of stuttering and lag while using the integrated intel UHD 630 GPU. This is frustrating as a student because I cannot use the dedicated GPU all day. it simply would not work in terms of battery life and temperatures. I understand that this is a common issue, I'm just curious to know whether or not there has been a solution to this at all. This is really frustrating because other than this stuttering, this laptop is fantastic and I love using it. in terms of specs it makes my old 2012 13" MacBook Pro with an i7, 16gb of RAM and an SSD look like complete garbage, yet my old macbook's iGPU seems to at least be able to handle scrolling through a webpage.
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16" MacBook Pro Stuttering under iGPU
- Thread starter RaiderFly
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You could try reinstalling MacOS to see if that would clear up the issue. If it doesn't, then I would suspect a hardware issue.
See I would, but this is a university owned computer. It's on loan to me for my 4 years of school and while I do have admin permissions, it's still managed by the school.
Disabling hardware acceleration makes the simulations I run for my astronomy class run at incredibly slow framerates lol
Ok sounds like you doing some computing when you are in Chrome, no surprise the iGPU struggles 
.
Perhaps you can add a cheap battery bank to extend the battery and use the dGPU? Or buy the M1 machine which i believe is more battery efficient..something like
.Perhaps you can add a cheap battery bank to extend the battery and use the dGPU? Or buy the M1 machine which i believe is more battery efficient..something like
Lenovo 40ALLG2WWW
that thing is 2x mbp capacity i believe for like 100$I'd buy the M1 if I had money haha. I got this laptop for free from my college program, supposedly able to handle anything we toss at it but so far it's not holding up.Ok sounds like you doing some computing when you are in Chrome, no surprise the iGPU struggles
Perhaps you can add a cheap battery bank to extend the battery and use the dGPU? Or buy the M1 machine which i believe is more battery efficient..something like
Lenovo 40ALLG2WWW
that thing is 2x mbp capacity i believe for like 100$
I would go to your school's IT group and show them what it's doing. If they haven't had other similar reports or have another machine that you can run side-by-side then you could determine if it's a problem in general or specifically with your machine. Then at least you'll know what's up and hopefully they can help you solve it. It doesn't sound like normal or expected behavior to me as while the internal GPU isn't great for graphics-intensive tasks, it is usually just fine for normal day-to-day tasks.
It will handle anything... presuming you let it use the dGPU and don't limit the CPU with low power mode (if it has one). It'll likely handle everything, including your Chrome animations (seem weird they do it in Chrome and not something like MatLab, but whatevs), but the battery life will not be what you want. You could keep an AC power adapter with you and top it off whenever you have the chance, or buy a big rechargeable USB-C battery pack and plug it in when you need the dGPU for certain situations.
But a big, hot, multicore Intel i7/i9 processor and a separate dedicated GPU (which basically use almost as much power as the CPU does) simply isn't going to provide you 10+ hours of battery life on a machine also trying to power a high-resolution 16" screen.
Easiest solution would be to buy a big USB-C battery and plug that into your laptop as you carry your laptop class to class. That way it'll top off between each class. Unplug it, use laptop in class in whatever way gives you the performance profile you require, then plug back in when class is over and you move on to the next. It's one more thing to carry but it's easier than trying to find a place to plug it in during each class (though perhaps at your school that's less of a problem with good modern lecture halls).
A 6 core i7 and a separate GPU with a 16" display... yeah, basically. Though it's not just the early 2000's... it's like that still for Intel-based machines.
For a while I used a Microsoft SuraceBook 2 with an i7 and a dGPU. When the GPU kicked in, I could watch the battery gauge drop in realtime, one point every 2-3 minutes.
I've been emailing them. They gave me the go-ahead to try and reinstall macOS on it, since my user account has admin permissions. So far it seems like turning off touchbar text suggestions has helped significantly, but the iGPU still isn't pushing a smooth experience even web browsing.
Okay so update. Tomorrow I'm bringing the laptop to the IT department and they're going to compare it side by side with another of the same laptop. If the issue isn't present on the other one they'll give me the problem-free one and send mine in.
Completely forgot to update. They gave me a new machine and once I set it up, I discovered it had the exact same issue (Plus physically it was filthy lol- and despite the better keyboard some keys were sticking) so I swapped it back for my original machine. Honestly it seems like as time's gone on, a lot of the stuttering is either gone or just less noticeable. Maybe Apple will update it someday, but whatever I guess
If both machines are doing it, then it's likely that whatever you're doing is truly taxing the machine (and not as "simple" as you think it may be), or some specific software on your machine is impacting the performance (since you seemed to say it started after setting it up with your stuff).
Might be a good time to take inventory of all the software and utilities you've got installed and see if you can find the culprit.
Whatever is not performing well, try doing it on a friend's machine of similar specs. If it works well on your friend's, then you'll know it's something specific about the combination of software on your machine.
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