Twilight Render User Forum

I've often struggled to understand what's going on with rendering on the MBP. If I have rendering going, Power adapter on. "Never sleep" setting, the rendering seems to be going on OK and CPU shows full activity when another program is active. OK. But the fan becomes quiet and the computer is cool...

If I click into SketchUp--and do nothing else. The fan fires up and computer gets hot. render continues of course.

Seems like the CPU also takes some "breaks",, drops down for bit, whatever the active program is.

Unfortunately, it's probably a "thermals" issue common to Macs. It's essentially throttling itself to control heat. Definitely start by getting a good cooling pad under the machine.

I agree a heating pad will be a good idea, especially because I just bought a new -old replacment MBP. (Does anyone have recommendations?) But I wonder why, if Twilight is rendering in the background, does the heat and fan go down. It's only when rendering and having SketchUp active (not doing anything, not even orbiting) that the heat seems to rise.

Is Twilight still rendering just as hard when SketchUp is not the active window? Does simply having SketchUp window active put my machine under stress? It's strange.

Difficult to know, possibly the GPU kicks in when you put SU/TWL in the foreground... causing extra heat causing the fan to come on?

When the Twilight Render window is minimized, the display of the image is performed less frequently. The render is still happening at the same speed, it just isn't updating the displayed image as frequently.

But that is only if the Render window is minimized, not if another window is focused or in the foreground.

Video makes me dislike my Mac! I need it for certain software and generally enjoy using it, but if I continue much with rendering I'll just need another machine.