opengl vs metal / very high gpu usage on mac i7

[evdama]

• I love this screensaver a lot 😃
• On my new M1 Mac mini all is good, no issues.
• However, I've also installed it on my 2017 Macbook Pro with a dual-core i7 and the built-in Intel Iris 650 which has an external 5120 x 1440 monitor connected to it. Not sure that makes any differnce, imo it shouldn't but either way: the Intel Iris load goes through the roof activating this amazing Screensaver which is a no go... leaving it running for longer periods a thermal no go. Can you advise?

[monroewilliams]

The OpenGL/Metal code for the screensaver isn't doing anything too complicated (the most unusual thing is probably some instanced drawing coordinated with the vertex shader that it uses to reduce the amount of data written each frame), but it sounds like something it's doing is hitting a slow path in the drivers for the Iris 650.

You could try changing the render API between Metal and OpenGL in settings and see if one is better than the other, but to find the root cause and come up with a workaround I'd have to spend some time profiling on similar hardware.