When I use my MacBook Pro1 to share content in a Zoom meeting, it occasionally seems to get stuck. Sharing the screen works fine, for a bit, then it freezes, and then it gets replaced by a black box. I don’t find out until a minute later, when people politely cough and say “so… we can’t see what you’re doing anymore…”
The first time, I figured something just got crosswired somewhere, with Zoom and YuJa and Sidecar all trying to do things with my display. I rebooted, and the problem went away. Then, it happened again, and I figured I should try to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.
Some googling2 turned up similar issues on Windows and Linux laptops, related to graphics cards. And then I saw this page from University of Minnesota’s IT site that lists security permissions and switching the GPU as possible causes.
I checked the security permissions setting, and it was good. So, maybe the laptop decided to switch from integrated graphics to dedicated graphics card while I was sharing the screen, and maybe that tripped up Zoom somehow? There shouldn’t have been a need to switch - the laptop was plugged in, so it’s not an energy saving thing. Maybe Zoom started using the integrated graphics system more, and hit a threshold that moved things over to the dedicated graphics card?
To test it, I went into the Battery settings panel, and turned off “automatic switching”.
That means, when I do unplug, I may want to manually switch back to the integrated graphics? Not sure how to even do that.
About This Mac shows which GPU is currently being used: the dedicated Radeon Pro, or integrated graphics.
Anyway. After testing a few times since, it seems to be solid now. This seems like a stupid thing to have to think about, but here I am…