Hi @Bryan_Allen – sorry for the slow response here. We’ve discussed this class of issue a few times internally and it’s a really frustrating one for us. From what I can see, the biggest clue in your report is this:
As you’ve surmised, this indicates that Roon isn’t crashing or hanging up, but instead that the interface is failing to redraw. Unfortunately, our options are extremely limited in cases like this, because this points to a driver issue.
Roon uses a custom graphics engine, like a video game. This engine is based on OpenGL, which is what allows Roon to provide identical functionality on so many different platforms, and what allows a team of our size to develop for so many platforms.
We depend on OpenGL to render our interface, and in turn, OpenGL depends on your GPU’s drivers to let Roon know when the interface needs to be redrawn. We have seen some graphics drivers have issues with this (Intel in particular, especially with older models like the 3000 and 4000) and we’ve seen this driver weakness affect many other applications, including widely used applications like Outlook and Photoshop.
Unfortunately, this leaves us with few real paths forward. We have seen times when Intel releases an updated driver and the issue goes away completely, which obviously would be a nice solution here. Some Intel drivers seem to work decently (including affected GPUs on OSX) and some appear to have significant issues in how they communicate with OpenGL and the applications that depend on it (like Roon).
In systems with multiple GPU’s, we’ve seen improvements when people “force” Roon to use the non-Intel GPU, as described here. We know that’s not an option for everyone, but it has helped some of the maybe 20 or 30 reports of this issue we’ve seen.
There’s nothing we like less than saying “we can’t do better” but unfortunately in this case we are the mercy of the driver.