Mac Mini 2012 - Screensaver stuttering
Hello,
most screen savers are stuttering on my Mac Mini 2012 with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO SDD. This occurs with Catalina and Mojave as well.
This includes Mac OS Standard Arabesque and Flurry, and as well non-standard Aerials.
If I play the Aerials videos directly in Quicktime, then no issue at all.
The behavior is always the same, screensaver runs fine for three to six minutes and then the frame rate dramatically drops. Clicking on the screen or hitting any keyboard key brings up the Catalina login screen, and couple of seconds later the screensaver returns to normal frame rate (without logging in).
I used activity monitor to monitor CPU usage (incl. CPU history enabled while screensaver is running). There is nothing usual bothering the CPU, one of the four logical cores shows a peak at 75% to 80% due to maybe some background tasks, but basically the other three cores are bored.
Energy Saving is set to Never/Never, but did not change anything. It somehow feels the machine is either busy or tries to save energy, but both is not plausible compared to CPU load and energy settings.
Any ideas appreciated, Thank you in advance.
Best regards,
Stefan
Mac mini, macOS 10.15