Status report. My trash can spent a couple of weeks at an Apple authorized service provider while I was on vacation. I spoke to Apple over the phone a couple of different times, and was never able to confirm a legitimate recall program on the GPUs. I was simply encouraged to have the system inspected under the AppleCare extended warranty in effect on the machine. I provided the service technician with examples of the render glitches and artifacting, as well as a link to this thread and other resources I have compiled during the course of this troubleshoot. No surprise that standard Apple diagnostic tests came back clean with no problems. Luckily I was very direct and clear with the technician indicating that I suspected the latter would be the case. I think my confidence in addition to the resources I provided spurred the technician to actually attempt to recreate the problem beyond running diagnostic tests. THANKFULLY, the problem was recreated by the service center. As a result, the D700 GPUs were replaced along with the RAM in the trashcan, for the second time in the lifetime of this MacPro. The original hardware replacements also included the motherboard. This round of replacements did not. Since I returned to the production desk this week, I have been putting the trash can through the ringer. All exports are using GPU-accelerated renders. I've also re-exported some troublesome long-format videos full of 4K and color/film effects which proved particularly troublesome in the past. I made an attempt to "overheat" the cards by exporting about a dozen long-form videos in a row, while still working on other edits. So far, every export has been clean and free of these undeliverable glitches! It is so very refreshing, to have a 30-minute 4K program export in less than a 4 hours versus 12 hour plus renders without GPU-acceleration. Those long renders were become work-inhibiting and deadline killers! I'm not holding my breath, but will continue to use GPU-accelerated renders for all work. If the issue arises again, this thread will be the first to know. Perhaps there is hope?
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