FCP jerky playback and high GPU useage on Mac Studio M2

Your mac is more than capable of handling this sort of work.

Something must be off.

First, try deleting preferences - always one of the first things we do when FCP misbehaves.

To delete preferences, hold down command and option while starting the application and click Delete Custom Settings. The application will start with default settings and open an "Untitled" library. Adjust the settings, reopen the library you were working, and see how it works now.

Second, there could be some third party software modifications causing trouble.

Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

You may also temporarily test using just one display and see if that makes any difference. Using two displays makes the GPU have to do more work, but the work you describe should not tax it as much as you are seeing.

An etrecheck report shows the Mac's installed software and other anonymized details. You can search here in other threads for other posted reports. Etrecheck was written by a long-time user here to help reduce the back-and-forth about system configuration questions. It's a tidy report that can help identify potential issues. Follow the instructions above from Luis to paste it into your reply.

You used the "Additional text" button below to paste the report and got that 5000 char limit? If so, try pasting the first half, then the second half in another reply.

Was the 2013 iMac or its TimeMachine backup used to restore onto the new Mac Studio? Or was it built with freshly installed software from the AppStore? This can cause problems when 10 year old software that might have conflicts is migrated to a new machine, especially a new CPU architecture. This will likely be answered or at least suggested in the report.

Other than Google's keystone software and their background autoupdating software, nothing jumps out as me as known problems. See https://chromeisbad.com for instructions on how to completely remove Chrome and its background software.

Did you reset FCP Prefs?

Did you test with a single display?

terryb wrote:

I'm no hardware expert, but doesn't the M2 Max have hardware acceleration for H.265 encoding that doesn't shows up in CPU/GPU graphs? I'm sure others with deeper knowledge will chime in.

https://youtu.be/jm8vMeJv-dw

That's exactly what happens. (I can see how it may be perplexing if one is not aware of these dedicated chips.)

The dedicated encoding hardware does most of the job, and that is why it does it fast and silently, and the CPU and GPU are mostly idle.

Here is just one simple test I did, to illustrate the power of the hardware encoders, compared to using the CPU and GPU:

I imported a one-hour H264 video, put it in a FCP timeline, and exported to H265.

I took about 7 minutes, and the CPU and GPU were not highly used (about 150% CPU for FCP, plus under 10% each for VTDecoderXPCService and nVTEncoderXPCService).

Then, I tried converting the same one-hour video to H265 using HandBrake.

It immediately fired up all 14 cores of my Mac, and for the first time that I recall, I heard the fans blasting (it seemed like I was back with my Intel MBP!)

And, guess what, the expected time to encode was longer than achieved with the dedicated encoder.

This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if MicroSoft Teams is causing issues. I wonder if your organization configured it in a way so your screen is always being shared.

I'm no hardware expert, but doesn't the M2 Max have hardware acceleration for H.265 encoding that doesn't shows up in CPU/GPU graphs? I'm sure others with deeper knowledge will chime in.

https://youtu.be/jm8vMeJv-dw

Deromax wrote:

1) I need to keep Chrome. I have a specific uses for it.

FWIW Brave browser uses the same Chromium engine as Chrome but without extra CPU overhead etc that Chrome has.

https://brave.com/

What effects are you applying to the clips in the timeline?