been fighting my mac for weeks now, with constant freezes, hangs, system-wide crashes or video corruption from 1-100 minutes after reboot. seems i followed some bad advice in the past and turned on something i shouldn’t have. so, my thing for today is sharply worded advice:
Do not enable QuartzGL (2D acceleration) on your Mac Pro. To check that QuartzGL is off, open Terminal, paste in this line and press Return:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver QuartzGLEnabled -boolean NO
Reboot to make this take effect. Voila, no more annoying crashes. You’re welcome.
Gee, are you sure that you don’t have an overheating or defective GPU? I rather suspect that the install-time default is for this to be enabled and I don’t think most MacPros in general are crash-prone. The MacPro is a popular platform for both image and video editing and I really don’t think those folks run with 2D acceleration turned off…
Actually, Ben, QuartzGL is off by default on the Mac Pro, even with their high end GPUs. Applications that need QuartzGL turn it on themselves. I had some bum advice that suggested this as an “OMG SPEED UP UR MAC” option. I was dumb enough to listen. And yes, temp is fine, and under Vista on the same hardware, I don’t get any GPU-related issues, and GPU stress tests run fine overnight.
Stay with the defaults, kids. Don’t enable QuartzGL.