MacOs Ventura flickering black on Game View when enable Vsync

Unity Engine
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Hi everyone, I used 2021.3.1 and 2021.3.16 it happen this.

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This vsync issue seems to only happen when I have ProMotion turned on, when I set the refresh rate down to 60hz or connect to an external display, I don’t have the tearing/flickering issue.

macOS Ventura 13.1, Unity 2021.3.16f1
Macbook Pro 16", M1 Max

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Did you report this as a bug?

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Edit: please vote on the active and issue here Unity Issue Tracker - [Ventura][Silicon] Game/Scene view flickers when entering the Play Mode with Vsync on

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If you dont want to change your display settings…
I hereby present to you a kinda random fix I came up with while fiddling around with this issue:

#if UNITY_EDITOR_OSX

using UnityEngine;

namespace Utils {
    public static class MacVSyncFix {
        [RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethod(RuntimeInitializeLoadType.BeforeSplashScreen)]
        public static void Fix() {
            QualitySettings.vSyncCount = 2; // Change from default 1 to 2 did the trick
        }
    }
}

#endif

Just create a file somewhere in the Assets folder and you can now use the Game View’s VSync again.
In the builds I did not have any problems.

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This is locking the frame rate to half the screen’s refresh rate. Not really a fix, more like a crippling to get back to 60Hz when running in ProMotion’s 120Hz.

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Any updates on the internal status of this one @Tautvydas-Zilys ?

edit: just wanted to add that whilst I do feel like the Mac version of Unity is really struggling along as of late, I do really appreciate the hard work you’re putting in keeping us all in the loop. So thanks for that @Tautvydas-Zilys !

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I’ll ask the team responsible for that area.

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Hey @Tautvydas-Zilys , any updates from the team? Or is there someone active on the forum I can ask? Thanks!

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Sorry, this fell of my radar a bit. As far as I can tell it’s assigned to the appropriate engineering team and it’s in their backlog. Unfortunately they couldn’t give me any particular timelines.

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This is bad. Bad.

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Hey @Tautvydas-Zilys - could you possibly get an update for us please?

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@Tautvydas-Zilys I understand that you guys have a lot of work to do, but could you please explain why it’s taking so long to fix the flickering bug? The flickering is not only annoying, but it also makes ProMotion unusable on MacBooks. It’s been like this for over six months now :confused: I either have to plug the laptop into an external monitor or configure the Display settings every time I work in Unity. I’m confused why this isn’t a priority for you. I don’t mean to sound rude, and I apologize if I do…

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And if you’re using a black background, it’s also hard to see why your game keeps jarring itself all over the place. Thanks to this thread, I found an indication of the symptom, even if we don’t yet know the cause.

There’s something wrong with the depth buffer, would be my guess, on Unity for Macs with Apple Silicon.

@Tautvydas-Zilys can we at least get some indication that your teams have figured out why and what, and how you’ll fix… and when?

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Can we get an update please @Tautvydas-Zilys @Alexey @Gennady @KevinWelton @Phil_Z @anyone? It’s been months…

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If there is a workaround, and it seems there is, use the workaround and move on, don’t expect timely bug fixes from Unity, their turnaround times are 6+ months on average, and a mac only non computer exploding issue is of below average priority.

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Eh, I disagree. The workaround is either to halve the framerate of my screen which doesn’t help when I’m making sure things are framerate independent, or disable vsync (which is what I do) but it eats battery. So either way Unity runs like crap on AS Macs. I pay a lot of money to Unity, I think I’m well within my rights to be politely chasing up on a bug that’s been annoying me for months.

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You are totally within your rights, I just think it’s wasted effort. You cannot depend on Unity delivering fixes in a timely manner so don’t depend on that. Unity has always (at least the last 5-6 years) had a ton of issues on Macs and with Silicon the issues have exploded.

For example, here is a video of me having tons of fun making Unity freeze when trying to maximize / minimize the game view by double clicking the top bar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9DS9MvybDE

I battled with QA for a bit, but then I somehow found out that adding command line arguments to disable editor multithreading stops the freezing, so I just did that and moved on. After also having to disable multithreaded rendering on my builds on all platforms to stop our games from crashing, I think it’s more productive for me to consider Unity a single threaded editor and renderer and act accordingly than to actually fight with QA.

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These problems are MUCH worse when trying to screen record video of gameplay via Quicktime or similar. Shockingly bad. Something needs to be done about Unity’s general disregard for Apple Macs given their new claim to being THE engine for VisionOS.

No idea who to nudge to make this concern into action at Unity’s end. Do knows some folks at Apple that might be pissed to discover this kind of goings on and am sending this thread their way.

@ , please do better for Mac and (therefore) VisionOS, iOS and iPads. This kind of lag on meaningful responses and fixes to significant and fundamental and obvious flaws is deeply troubling for a market that Unity has pretty much to themselves.

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I was told they are actively working on fixing this.