Periods of severe graphical stuttering under Big Sur

This is likely an issue on Apple's end, and I've reported it to them as well (FB8926076) – but I've only seen this issue while playing Minecraft, and it makes the game nearly-unplayable, so I'm reporting it here too for posterity.

When playing Minecraft, the system occasionally exhibits periods of extremely poor graphics performance (approximately 2-5 FPS). The issue is not always consistent to reproduce, and it generally only occurs after Minecraft has been running for several minutes — but it tends to occur fairly regularly (each period of stuttering lasts 10-60 seconds, with usually about 30 seconds to 5 minutes between periods of stuttering). The issue is not present when dual-booting Catalina on the same machine (so it’s not a hardware issue), but it has occurred in all versions of Big Sur, including all betas (from 11.0 beta 1 back in June to the latest 11.1 beta) and all public releases. Profiling with certain Instruments (including Animation Hitches) has a tendency to prevent the issue, or reduce its frequency of occurrence.

The issue affects the graphical performance of the entire system — all graphics and animations render at the reduced framerate. The issue is easiest to reproduce when using Mission Control or other gestures to switch between desktop spaces, and it seems to occur more often when running the game in fullscreen — but it occurs during any normal gameplay circumstances, singleplayer or multiplayer, making the game unplayable for frequent periods of 30 seconds or more.

According to the F3 debug screen, the game is rendering at full speed even during the stuttering. It appears that most frames are being rendered but not actually presented on the display.

During the stuttering, messages such as the following are repeatedly logged to the console:

default 10:56:18.062115-0800 WindowServer Display 0x04280886 reported 'not ready' for 10 sequential attempts
 default 10:56:18.426417-0800 kernel GFX0-0x1e3-A::_doControl(23) not gated
 Backtrace 0xffffff7f9fcfab34 0xffffff7f9fcc77bb 0xffffff7f9fcc8464 0xffffff8000a470ee 0xffffff7f9fcd79e2 0xffffff8000a512bb 0xffffff80003aba61
 debug 10:56:18.426358-0800 WindowServer displayStateFilter policy:1 declareActivity:0 result:0x7fc34792dd40 event:11 sender:0x10000069e eventDelta:0x3582cab deltaMS:0x802db2 displayState:2 prevTimeStamp:0x4a796b267151 eventTime:0x4a796e7e9dfc
 default 10:56:18.426431-0800 kernel Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
 default 10:56:18.426445-0800 kernel com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(585.0)[C007B094-8597-3C47-BD2F-E1203C60C107]@0xffffff7f9fcb3000->0xffffff7f9fce1fff
 default 10:56:18.426456-0800 kernel dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.9)[D3BE7AAF-D5B2-3126-8BBD-19BC6CBA67F0]@0xffffff8002bf4000->0xffffff8002c1bfff
 default 10:56:18.426469-0800 kernel com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(585.0)[B6DBE116-5A15-3AC5-9134-90794B61EAB6]@0xffffff7f9fcf8000->0xffffff7f9fd00fff
 default 10:56:18.426489-0800 kernel dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(585)[C007B094-8597-3C47-BD2F-E1203C60C107]@0xffffff7f9fcb3000->0xffffff7f9fce1fff
 default 10:56:18.426498-0800 kernel dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.9)[D3BE7AAF-D5B2-3126-8BBD-19BC6CBA67F0]@0xffffff8002bf4000->0xffffff8002c1bfff

An Instruments trace is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dOqZPSd1EaUL_LXiHr-kbHlO1Fkuql74/view?usp=sharing. I was on my desktop with Instruments and Console open, I had Minecraft running in the background in full-screen mode, and I was using trackpad gestures to move in and out of Mission Control. Note that under the “Display” instrument, some surfaces remain on-screen for 50-500 ms, even when other surfaces are queued and ready to render (see attached image; blue lines are VSyncs).

I've also attached a Minecraft logfile, but it doesn't show anything unusual. I also have a Console log (covering the same time period as the Instruments trace) which I can upload if needed, but I haven't done so yet because I haven't gone through it to redact sensitive information.

MC-206156 may be a similar issue but is very scarce on details, so it's impossible to tell. MC-206063 lists similar symptoms, but the user reports that she only experiences the issue on a snapshot version, while I have this problem on the 1.16.4 release.

My device is a Mid-2014 MacBook Pro 15”, with NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB. The issue occurs when using either my laptop’s internal display or an external monitor.