Magic 2.5 locking up

[glitchpudding]

Lately, while running Magic 2.5 on my Mac, when I walk away for a bit and then come back to my desk, I find Magic to be locked up to the point of requiring a force quit. Out of nowhere, this started happening every day. It has happened with both simple and complex projects, and with projects that share no modules between them.

I'm going to try reinstalling 2.5, then try reverting back to a previous version, but I'd love to know if anyone else has encountered this issue.

[Magic]

I would try v2.33 which you can download from your Magic account. That version has been out for a long time and we haven't had any reports of locking up, so if it still happens, then it's likely something on your computer.

[Sadler]

I have also been experiencing intermittent slowdowns for several weeks, although I use Windows. I have been reluctant to post because I haven't been able to reliably replicate the issue or find evidence that Magic is the cause, although it has always been running when the slowdowns occur. The slowdown seems to be related to heavy video use; for example, loading four 4K videos to compose, although this is not definitive — it could easily be an ISF issue, too, which I've been doing a lot of. The strange thing is that I get full FPS in such a scene (in my case, 144 FPS, when unconnected to a projector), but eventually, or after a parameter change or perhaps some other event, the FPS drops really low.

This is an empty scene showing 12fps.

Screenshot 2026-05-04 171411.png (3.17 KiB) Viewed 482 times

The UI slows down, as do the FPS in Magic and the rest of the PC. Quitting Magic takes some time in this state, and even after quitting, performance doesn't return. It's painful to do anything, with mouse clicks taking several seconds to register. I note, however, that there is no stress on the GPU (nothing in Task Manager and no fans spinning). I've been in this situation several times recently and have had to reboot the laptop to resolve the issue. More recently, however, I've discovered that resetting the graphics driver fixes the performance issue without the need for a reboot.
I have a hunch that Magic might be corrupting GPU memory, but I have no evidence of this. I run Magic almost every day, sometimes just in the background, so it's possible that Magic could be an innocent bystander, but I've never experienced a slowdown when Magic isn't running.

[Magic]

Have you tried using a GPU memory monitoring tool? There are many out there, but GPU-Z is the one we've used. I think the one from NVidia actually shows the textures that are in memory.

[Sadler]

I already had GPU-Z installed.

01 is Magic open with an empty scene

gpu-z-01.gif (17.87 KiB) Viewed 475 times

02 is Magic with a scene running at 144fps

gpu-z-02.gif (18.01 KiB) Viewed 475 times

03 is Magic running with the same scene at 10fps

gpu-z-03.gif (17.91 KiB) Viewed 475 times

~

I tried a graphics driver reset while Magic was running slow - FPS recovered briefly before falling again.
As I surmised, the GPU load drops from 33% to 4% when the slow-down happens. The other params are what I would have expected in each case.
Note, this isolated scene seems to reliably slow the system, I can email it to you if you think it might help. In the meantime I will try to find the nVidia app you mentioned.

[Magic]

Sure that would be great, thanks.