MP 1,1-5,1 Mojave and Big Sur viewport pause/lag and freeze

[nkinne]

Hey all. Long time, first time.
I'm working with a 2009 Mac Pro 5,1 that I just upgraded to Big Sur via OpenCore. After migrating everything over from another drive running Mojave, I noticed right away one very particular issue that seems to be common amongst the few programs I use most often.

The problem is a weird, constant pause/lag of the viewport and often the entire program itself. It'll be fine for 30 seconds then totally freeze up for another 30 seconds or so- constantly on/off making it unusable. Sometimes the programs will freeze or quit altogether.
This seems to only be an issue with Blender 3.0 (in both Mojave and Big Sur), Zbrush 2021 (in Big Sur only) Google Chrome (in both Mojave and Big Sur), and an old sketching program called Mischief (in both Mojave and Big Sur). It's driving me nuts as this is my main workstation for most of my 3D work and need to upgrade the OS in order to use up-to-date rendering software. I'm in a bit of a bind... I think. That is unless I'm overlooking something really obvious.

Specs:
Early 2009 cMP 5,1 Dual Socket 3.46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
32 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
1TB Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD boot+ 2x 1TB stock Apple Mechanical HDD
AMD Radeon Pro Duo (Polaris) GPU

My daily use requires mostly Photoshop, Zbrush, Blender, Unreal 4, Marmoset (or it's equivalent) Google Chrome- all with the use of a Wacom Cintiq as my main monitor.

I've scoured the internet and forums for a solution but have come up with only more questions or partial answers. If I've missed a previous posting addressing this, my apologies.

If there is any insight as to what may be happening here, please sound off. I can provide any other useful info if needed. Thanks a bunch.

 

[tsialex]

When it pauses, what is the process that is having the biggest CPU usage, kernel_task?

Do you have any saved KPs? Be aware that an early-2009 cross-flashed to MP5,1 having constant KPs is the fastest way to get a brick.

 

[nkinne]

From what I'm able to see from the kernel_task, the CPU% is very low. The largest usage is just from the Window Server. All my tests only consist of starting and running the problem programs under no stress as I'm not even able to get that far.
I'm not totally sure how to find KP's and I can't say I've ever had a crash that was then followed with a panic report after reboot. What I do have are crash reports. They will be attached here.

 

[mikas]

I am not that valid to troubleshoot panic reports, but I have an observation, or a guess, if I'm admitted.

There is almost identical part in every report at near the beginning (quoted down below). Thread 0 crashing or aborted because of Graphics hardware error.

You do have a rear ann exotic card in there, a dual GPU one, and in a cMP with unsupported OS. Maybe the drivers, the OS the GPU HW and software are not living happily together in this combination. Your GPU did work previously with older OSses I suppose?

Apple has deprecated OpenGL and we just don't know how it is and will be behaving on newer OSses as it's not being developed anymore. I suppose those programs all take advantage of OpenGL, not Metal, at least on some parts of their workings.

Yo don't happen to have any other graphics cards to test with?

The crash similarities (all 3 almost identical):
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY
Application Specific Information:
abort() called
Application Specific Signatures:
Graphics hardware encountered an error and was reset: 0x00000001
Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff2066792e __pthread_kill + 10
1 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff206965bd pthread_kill + 263
2 libsystem_c.dylib 0x00007fff205eb406 abort + 125
3 libGPUSupportMercury.dylib 0x00007fff468b2096 gpusGenerateCrashLog.cold.1 + 95
4 libGPUSupportMercury.dylib 0x00007fff468a921c gpusGenerateCrashLog + 89
5 com.apple.AMDRadeonX4000GLDriver 0x0000000126c6b6e2 gpusKillClientExt + 9
6 libGPUSupportMercury.dylib 0x00007fff468aa72d gpusSubmitDataBuffers + 490
7 com.apple.AMDRadeonX4000GLDriver 0x0000000126c45d0c glrATI_Hwl_SubmitPacketsWithToken + 112

ps. I almost bought one of those Duo's earlier myself, because of VII scarcity. But I couldn't get a Duo either at that time.

 

[tsialex]

From what I'm able to see from the kernel_task, the CPU% is very low. The largest usage is just from the Window Server. All my tests only consist of starting and running the problem programs under no stress as I'm not even able to get that far.
I'm not totally sure how to find KP's and I can't say I've ever had a crash that was then followed with a panic report after reboot. What I do have are crash reports. They will be attached here.

All crashes seem to be are GPU related Graphics hardware encountered an error and was reset: 0x00000001, did you tested with another GPU?

Also, since you have a cross-flashed early-2009, check if you have a working NVRAM garbage collection:

OpenCore on the Mac Pro

There is a extremely simple way (simple here as in not need to know how the NVRAM works/check free space indicators/validate checksums and etc) to check if the garbage collection failed and the need to reflash with the clean dump: Dump the BootROM with ROMTool Open the dump with the most...

forums.macrumors.com

It's extremely rare and usually happens with people that had a Titan GPU in past, but some crazy GPU errors are NVRAM related. Also with a Mac Pro that is crashing constantly, you could easily brick it if the garbage collection stops working - KPs (PanicInfo Logs) are saved inside the NVRAM.

 

[nkinne]

I don't have any other GPU's to test with other than the stock NVIDIA GeForce GT 120. @mikas, I've suspected that the deprecated support of OpenGL is the culprit here because everything else works great accept the programs I've mentioned. However, I'm not very clear on why Zbrush works perfectly fine on Mojave and not Big Sur.

I'm wondering if just trying another OS like Catalina or maybe even High Sierra might work to get more broad support if I can't figure out any other solutions.

@tsialex, I'll give your suggestion a careful shot. I definitely don't want to brick anything.


@mikas The only reason I bought the Pro Duo was for the exact reason you were looking into them. The VII was, of course, my first choice but couldn't bare to fork over the exorbitant amounts some of these monsters are asking for them.