Franz: Requires High Pref GPU

[talbaumel]

Hi, On a 2013 macbook pro running MacOS 10.13.1 Beta got huge performance dips while running franz latest beta
The activity monitor shows the app "Requires High Pref GPU" which sounds not right

Thanks, Tal

[Wouter0100]

Are you supporting Franz by providing processing power? (e.g. Premium for processing power) If so, will disabling this help?

[adlk]

This shouldn't have anything to do with the miner. As far as I know, Electron doesn't support the same fine grained settings for controlling GPU support as Chrome does.
I need to do some tests with app.disableHardwareAcceleration().
My main concern about that is that this also disables the hardware accelerated CSS transitions.

[dan-cs]

I have the same issue on 2017 MBP (MacOS 10.12.6) - Franz uses high perf GPU

[apuignav]

I had the same issue, and found that Messenger was the culprit. If I disable it, no high performance GPU is needed...

[danielbayley]

I can confirm; performance is atrocious unless I disable Facebook messenger!

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)
2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB
macOS High Sierra 10.13.1
Franz 5.0.0-beta.11[.135]

[adlk]

Thanks for your reports, this is super interesting.
Can anyone of you run the app from source? I'm curious if app.disableHardwareAcceleration() actually makes any difference on your system.

Please don't forget to run the app with $ yarn start:live to access the live API.

[freinbichler]

I added app.disableHardwareAcceleration(); in src/index.js and now the app does not require High Perf GPU anymore. My services (Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram) still seem to work without any issues.
So it would be nice to at least have the option in settings to disable hardware acceleration.

Let me know if you need more information.

[adlk]

@freinbichler Does the overall performance still feel the same to you? (Of course this is purely subjective)

[freinbichler]

It feels exactly the same to me, yes.

[adlk]

Unfortunately, with disabled hardware acceleration, I've experienced a lot of glitches that affect the stability of the webviews.

I've decided to not ship beta 14 with this but add an option to enable/disable hw accel in a future release.

[ghost]

I have 2016 MBP and have the exact same problem with both Franz and "Freechat for messenger" from the Mac app store. I found this messenger only app which is an open source project and it doesnt have the issue. https://fbmacmessenger.rsms.me

[kecinzer]

What about this issue? I can't still find option to change it in beta16.

[dregge8]

Unfortunately, with disabled hardware acceleration, I've experienced a lot of glitches that affect the stability of the webviews.

I've decided to not ship beta 14 with this but add an option to enable/disable hw accel in a future release.

@adlk Although your saying the "disabled hardware acceleration" creates glitches, could you add it anyways with context of telling the user it may break their experience. Right now Franz is totally unusable on my MacBook after the upgrade to High Sierra (even after disabling messenger).

[mstratford]

I would also appreciate having it as an optional toggle, from my (albeit limited) testing, the extra battery life / convenience of not having to force iGPU with gfxCardStatus before reopening Franz is far higher than some slightly dodgy animations.

[winkelsdorf]

Hooray, looks like 5.0.0-beta.17 released today finally fixes this 🎉 Me and my MacBook thank you @adlk! 🥇 (Edit: likely misobservation)

_Edit: Looks like it switches to High Performance GPU as soon as e.g. a photo is viewed or video is played now. After switching to GPU it stays in high performance mode. Not quite the solution I hoped for._

[freinbichler]

@winkelsdorf for me it requires high-perf GPU right from the start using Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram. I think it depends on the services you have added.

The ideal and probably most trivial solution would still be adding a setting that toggles app.disableHardwareAcceleration(). After every release I add this line and recompile Franz myself, otherwise I could not leave Franz open all day because of the battery drain.

[winkelsdorf]

@freinbichler Actually that's exactly the same service configuration as I am using. I was very likely to quick, as I observe the same behaviour as you now (again).

Of course is toggling the app.disableHardwareAcceleration() the right solution. I still hope for it to be available in the settings itself, without the need to recompile.

This is currently the only Electron app I'm using which uses high-perf GPU right away and struggles so much with my battery.. Editing the post above now. Still waiting for the hooray, but I don't expect too much. Already mailed the issue and solution long time ago.

@adlk Are you aware of any real issues _not_ related to a bug in Chromium or the GPU drivers itself? I know of the latter both, but I am unaware of anything else. Glitches related to faulty things outside of the scope of your code should not be the reason to enable high-perf GPU for all users. Instead I would prefer to see a switch to toggle it as @freinbichler said.

[mstratford]

@adlk Tried the new beta, from what I can see the only thing that is graphically glitching so far is the Franz settings menu itself, but I can certainly live with that :)

[arvenil]

With Franz 5.0.0-beta.23 (2019-02-01) disabling hardware acceleration works for me - no more glitches and high-perf gpu request.

[Deltachaos]

Would also love to see a toggle for this!

[andrejohansson]

I have this problem too:

Windows 10 Home (and Pro)
Franz: 5.0.1
Release: 4.0.8 / win32 / x64

High GPU and consuming >30% of the gpu...my laptop is burning up!

Services I use:

• Facebook Messenger
• LinkedIn
• Skype
• Hangouts
• Whatsapp
• Google Calendar
• Outlook
• Github
• Discord
• Steam
• Gmail

Unfortunately in the current state, franz is not usable for me on the laptop. I can concurr that it seems to kick in when you show images/videos in a conversation.

[arvenil]

There is an option to disable "Hardware acceleration" and it works.

However it makes in my case Franz to be unusable. Extremely slow.
However 😄 I found out that with "Hardware acceleration" turned ON, High Perf GPU is triggered by Facebook Messenger. I tried to disable it but this doesn't work - it still requires High Perf GPU. If I kill it (QUIT button) in activity monitor then surprisingly, after brief reset, Facebook Messenger continuous to work and doesn't require high perf GPU anymore.

This gives me an ugly workaround for now (every time I start Franz I need to kill that process, but I usually just put whole laptop to sleep so it's not often) and also this suggest something more could be done to just limit every app from triggering "High Perf GPU" but still use "Hardware acceleration". In other words disabling "Hardware acceleration" seems to be an overkill.

[arvenil]

Firefox also had similar problems, however they fixed them in nightly (maybe even in official release now as I'm using nightly for quite long). Hardware acceleration in firefox is turned on, yet it doesn't trigger high perf gpu. I tested Facebook Messenger and it doesn't trigger high perf gpu in firefox. When I open netflix and click play on a movie it nicely switches to high perf gpu (expected for hq videos). So I would say definitely there is some room for fixes in Franz.

[arvenil]

Canceled subscription because of this;/

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