At some point it ran much worse on my old 2012 MacBook Pro, however that turned out to be cooling issues with the laptop, which throttled the CPU and made it consume a lot more power. After I cleaned out the dust nests out of the fans, CPU usage and power consumption went down by a lot.
You mentioned an important factor too. Apple seems to be too paranoid on keeping the speed of the fans low. This means that a lot of times the CPU ends up throttling down the computer speed because things are overheating.
I've noticed a considerable gain of performance on my Mac since I started using Macs Fan Control to adjust the RPM values to sensible ranges. Yes, the fans will kick out under heavy load, but at least the machine doesn't start crawling.
Exercising the fans from time to time also helps to prevent that too much dust settles on them permanently.
Roland, thanks to this forum topic, I did find a performance regression with SDLGL-PP, which is at least visible on my (old) PC, see https://github.com/openMSX/openMSX/issues/1245
Perhaps it's related to the issues you had. You can try by using build openmsx-603-g9e3199947 or earlier (use the latest build that's lower or equal than this for the best comparison).
I can assure you they pay much more attention to this than your average software developer.
Never questioned this! Sometimes I write code to get the job done, people use the code and that's it. My boss never lets me optimise or remove small bugs. He only wants new features. That, I suppose is with most of the software on this planet. (looking at Apple & MS as an example). After all: what fun is there for a developer when his code runs 5% faster, has a way more intelligent algoritme or is smaller.
For people who consider: code an art, they're product their pride, well for them it matters but the boss never pays for that.
The regression I talked about is related to sync-to-vblank being triggered by that change in openMSX. And that one is apparently stupidly implemented in the Linux nvidia driver (440.82). If I disable sync-to-vblank, the CPU usage is normal again.
So Roland, which version were you running exactly? Although you are not using nvidia, perhaps the issue is related.
The regression I talked about is related to sync-to-vblank being triggered by that change in openMSX. And that one is apparently stupidly implemented in the Linux nvidia driver (440.82). If I disable sync-to-vblank, the CPU usage is normal again.
So Roland, which version were you running exactly? Although you are not using nvidia, perhaps the issue is related.
Hi Manuel,
Currently its version 0.15.0-742-964ef0812e. I observe this energy usage on a Mac that has its apple approved ATI drivers. openMSX does something that makes the Mac decide it needs the Radeon card while I think that the integrated Intel UHD 630 also has enough muscle to do openMSX.
There is an article " Selecting Device Objects for Graphics Rendering " on the apple developers website that hints towards the ability to select the Graphics device: integrated, dGPU or external. This all relates to Apple's metal ( it's current alternative for OpenGL). I am not sure whether that's even usable.
have a nice day!
When you're running openMSX, can you check the CPU usage? Perhaps we can find out whether the power is spent in the CPU or in the GPU. The issue I saw was causing CPU cycles needlessly spent (caused by the nvidia driver).
openMSX isn't programmed against he Metal API, it's using SDL2.
Hi Manuel,
It uses around 10% cpu.
Its only logical to use SDL because that's portable, while Metal isn't.
https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/question-is-it-possible-to-se...
http://supermegaultragroovy.com/2016/12/10/auto-graphics-swi...
However I modified the Info.plist in the app, and it still automatically switches to discrete graphics. So I don’t think it works. Still you can give it a try.
Sounds like Apple. Documenting features that in reality will not work, because other software completely ignores or overrules settings.
I can assure you they pay much more attention to this than your average software developer.
Never questioned this! Sometimes I write code to get the job done, people use the code and that's it. My boss never lets me optimise or remove small bugs. He only wants new features. That, I suppose is with most of the software on this planet. (looking at Apple & MS as an example). After all: what fun is there for a developer when his code runs 5% faster, has a way more intelligent algoritme or is smaller.
For people who consider: code an art, they're product their pride, well for them it matters but the boss never pays for that.
I think part of the reason of waste of energy is inefficiend usage of resources.We can blame microsoft for the programming of an operating system that needs a good graphics card just to boot,so then we have to speak about energy efficiency when we have an operating system eating gigs of ram to boot,and what about features?how low can a cpu get to wasting power when it has to run thousand of services that the everyday user probably does not even need?
Ok we live in the modern day where everything is portable we have gcc linux and stuff visual studio any code can be even exported for z80 or other old processors if you have the patience.
I am not entirely happy with mac os i have to say.Used to like it more but noticed that as years passed efficiency went down.
I mean why would the cpu go to 30% just opening 2 firefox youtube tabs?i am not calculating or decrypting bit coins!And with the feautres modern gfx card have it should be easier and faster.
i think its the loop of chicken and egg.We need processors to run operating systems that are bloated full of shit and then we demand at the same time to have energy efficiency which is impossible,because cpus have millions of transistors to work and to do work they cant be off it we have hundreds of ugly processes and services running.I think you get the idea.
sometimes i miss asm language when people could bang the metal and do good stuff with no need to have a dx11 6gigabyte video ram vcard just to play a game.however this era is long gone.its part of our every day life now that there can be no low energy if we need a cpu that has 100 cores and a gfx card with 1 billion transistor...