Intel HD 530 which is used for applications not requiring complex 3D graphics.My MacBook Pro 2016 has 2 built-in graphic chips: To be precise, the load to the discrete GPU. Anything that required even a moderate load from the GPU led to my laptop becoming comatose. The problem was not isolated to playing 3D games. I ran out of ideas and went back to research. I was wrong :-( I had exactly the same CPU throttling problem when I tried to play Velocidrone on Windows under Bootcamp. I was hoping that the performance problems I was having won’t happen under Windows. I even tried to install Windows under Bootcamp on my MacBook pro.Upgraded to macOS Catalina hoping that would make the problem go away.I checked my SSD for filesystem errors, found a few and had them repaired.Over the next few days I tried a few different things to fix that: However, I couldn’t find any correlation with any of the above. One of my friends suggested that the slowdown was caused by a heavy memory or I/O activity. One thing was clear - something was hogging my CPU. What was that mysterious “kernel task”? The search on the internet didn’t bring clarity. No matter how much I tried, I wasn’t able to find a reason for that behaviour. The CPU was consumed by “kernel_task” whatever that wasĪnd this is what it looked like when it came back to normal: When I looked at the CPU load chart it looked like this: Then everything sped back up, only to go back down in another 20 seconds. Once I started the game, the CPU went to 100% and the frame rate dropped from above 40FPS to one frame per few seconds.

However, this time it was a different story. Although MacBook Pro doesn’t have enough power to run it in 4K resolution, it works reasonably well in 1280x1024.

I occasionally play Velocidrone FPV racing simulator on it. Recently I started experiencing a weird issue with my 2016 MacBook Pro. How I fixed kernel_task consuming 100% of my MacBook’s CPU

Mac cpu usage over 100