Toolbar blur causes high GPU usage on 2013 MacBook

Vlad

wav-e This is default system transparency and should not cause any issues. It is also used by Safari.

Can you be sure it is caused by start page and not something else?

wav-e

Vlad Yes, when I open any page power consumption decreases to zero. For example on this page:

When I open/select start page again gpu consumes a lot power again.
Start page may be opened, but if I am on any other tab (web page), then powerdraw is about zero.

Vlad

wav-e I am not able to reproduce that. Can you try in a new clean orion profile?

wav-e

Vlad Well, on clean profile I can reproduce it:

wav-e

Vlad What hardware do you use?
I think to compute blur for my old macbook very dificult, especially if it is not good optimised blur algorithm. So blur in any system app doesn't draw so much power. I think It will be useful feature if users can disable blur in browser if their hardware is old.

I would not like to use system accesability fix like contrast increase for one app 🙁

wav-e

@"Vlad" Where I can get an old version of browser?

Dustin

I have a 2013 MacBook Air running the latest Orion version on Big Sur and I installed iStat Menus to check utilization. It appears on my end, there's no increase in utilization from the integrated graphics.

The left side of the graph is regular web browsing, the white line indicates when I switched to the Start Page and you can see the utilization drops considerably.

adorabilis

If you can forego using the start page, you can mitigate your issue by setting new tabs to open an empty page instead.

B4ND1T

Sorry to not be giving a helpful response, but I think there is a point at which you have to remember, 2013 was 10 years ago, budget friendly hardware from 10 years ago is going to struggle. Plainly it is just out dated, hence why you can't utilise the latest operating systems on it.

I love old hardware but you can't expect it to keep up with modern programs and modern requirements.

wav-e

B4ND1T Well, if I could, I've just downloaded old version of browser. I've made stupid action again, when I've clicked to "update" button, when the browser worked well 🙁

I still think it is optimisation troubles - all supported software that uses blur background works well and not drain so much power. It will be cool, if developers just allow to users to disable blur.

ForumNinja404

wav-e Try turning on reduce transparency which should disable blur effects system-wide.