Chosen Solution
Hi all, Thanks for your time. I am having severe crashes when I play any computer games. I can’t last 5 minutes in game until I have a massive crash, the graphics pixelate like an ‘88 amstrad, hangs for a couple of minutes and my comp restarts automatically. The funny thing is, after my computer restarts, I can crash at anytime in Finder (usually within 5 minutes) without even starting a game. This repeats but gets worse each time the comp restarts, until I manually shutdown and wait 30 minutes, when I can use Finder again and everything goes back to normal. I have also noticed small little glitches on screen sometimes in finder - they come and go. Things to note: • The problem is occurring in High Sierra and Mojave (I updated to see if that would fix it). • I’ve just updated to 10.14.4 and the crash still occurs • I’ve reset nvram several times. • I have spoken to Apple live chat and ran through with them safe mode tests, as well as the new user test. They referred me to an Apple reseller. • I took in the machine to an Apple reseller (not the genius bar) and they “stress tested the unit for over 2 hours with 3d graphics and nothing had come up.” I picked it up when they wanted to pay more money. • This problem starts in game only, not anywhere else. • I have tried setting my gfx settings in WoW to the lowest. • I can force the crash to happen faster when the gfx has to render some distance. • I have tried Diablo, Hearthstone, and Dota and the same thing happens after 5-10 minutes. • My work requires me to use programs like PhotoShop and Premier (sometimes the files get up to 2 GB) and this doesn’t cause any issue. • I have tried Cinebench and it passes without a hiccup. System 27" iMac late 2013 3.5 GHz Intel i7 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB Mojave 10.14.3 I thought it might be my GPU but I have read on WoW forums that Nvidia and Apple drivers are causing issues. My big question is; is this a driver issue or actually something like a piece of hardware that is fault. Has anyone else experienced this because I can’t find anything on any forums? Thank you all for your time. Matt Below is the most recent crash report (just the start): Anonymous UUID: 4C7D787D-7782-9EA4-6C31-0D1C09F66ADB Thu Mar 28 21:53:26 2019 Panic Report panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff8011edd16d): Kernel trap at 0xffffff7f9338314c, type 14=page fault, registers: CR0: 0x000000008001003b, CR2: 0xffffff9201bcea58, CR3: 0x00000002ff48b0f4, CR4: 0x00000000001626e0 RAX: 0xffffff9201bcea00, RBX: 0xffffff8043bdd000, RCX: 0x0000013a0dcded1a, RDX: 0x000000000000013a RSP: 0xffffff9201d03700, RBP: 0xffffff9201d03700, RSI: 0x0000000000000002, RDI: 0xffffff8043bdd000 R8: 0xffffff9201d03438, R9: 0xffffff9201d03430, R10: 0x0000000000000000, R11: 0x0000000000000544 R12: 0xffffff803760f000, R13: 0xffffff803760f630, R14: 0x0000000000000000, R15: 0xffffff803752f800 RFL: 0x0000000000010286, RIP: 0xffffff7f9338314c, CS: 0x0000000000000008, SS: 0x0000000000000000 Fault CR2: 0xffffff9201bcea58, Error code: 0x0000000000000000, Fault CPU: 0x2, PL: 0, VF: 1
Not that Black & White! While your game play is crashing your systems resources are still in play. While it may appear PhotoShop is not effected its still involved here. Your crash Report offers a clue here: page fault Lets back up a bit … Your system has two areas of storage RAM and Drive (SSD or HDD) when your system needs more RAM space it will steal space within your drive as Virtual RAM. So large work piece like your Photo Shop drawing when held in RAM will often need to leverage more RAM (V-RAM) to hold the work piece (≤ 2 GB). Now lets dive into the differences between HDD’s & SSD’s as that is involved here. SSD’s handle drive space differently than HDD’s. HDD’s can handle many over-writes of used space SSD’s just can’t. So the drive needs to move static data to used space often in an effort for wear leveling. This is part of the housekeeping process the drive needs to do so when your system is using a lot of V-RAM the drive needs to work harder salvaging free space. If you are running both Photo Shop and your game app you are running your system harder as the drive is now also holding your work & game in scratch space (cache) on your SSD. OK, so where does that leave us? Your SSD drive is on the lean side. I recommend having 1/3 of the drive held as free space so the system doesn’t work as hard with it’s housekeeping tasks. In addition, I strongly recommend anyone running large work piece’s have enough RAM to hold 1/4 of work piece, if not more. So adding RAM and cleaning off your SSD is needed here.
