Big Sur extended display GUI Issue - Blank UI

Bugs
#1

Hi,

Recently bought Vital and it is an amazing synth, but during use I experienced a curious issue that I am unable to resolve.

I often use Sidecar to act as a secondary display, and it would appear that when running this way, opening Vital in either Logic Pro X or Ableton Live 10 results in a blank GUI.
The same behavior is also exhibited when connecting my MPC Touch device (again set as an extended display).

I have tried multiple combinations of display scaling etc to see if that has any impact and unfortunately the end result is always the same.

Without an extended display (just using the Macbook retina display) the GUI renders perfectly fine which leads me to believe it is something to do with the changes in resolution when using the extended display.

I am running a Macbook Pro 15 Quad-Core i7 with AMD Radion dGPU and OSX 11.2.

Happy to provide any additional information required to investigate.

Many thanks,

Simon

1 Like
#2

Hi,

For anyone interested in this issue, I appear to have found the cause. This appears to be centered around MacBooks with dGPU cards.

It’s a workaround fix but I have found that forcing the Mac to use the integrated GPU rather than the ATI radion fixes the issue. Running the following command from a terminal did this for me.

sudo pmset -c gpuswitch 0

sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0

The switches there are c for on charge and b for battery.

You can change the value to a 1 to force use of the dGPU and 2 to reenable auto switching.

My MacBook is a 2016 model so not sure if this will affect later ones but worth a go if you are experiencing the same issue I had. I would expect that a subsequent driver update for big sur will resolve this in the future.