We suggest you press the "Report to Apple" button when ChimeraX crashes to remind Apple that users still want support for OpenGL. There is nothing ChimeraX can do to prevent crashes from bugs in Apple's graphics drivers. Most ChimeraX crashes on Mac computers are in Apple's graphics drivers.
Apple's OpenGL graphics drivers in macOS frequently crash. Apple deprecated the community standard OpenGL 3D graphics library in 2018 in favor of their proprietary Metal graphics library. Even prior to that Apple OpenGL version was 4.1 which dates from 2010. Crashes in macOS versions 10.14 (Mojave), 10.15 (Catalina), and 11 (Big Sur) are all common.
No ChimeraX graphics crashes have been reported on Apple's new Mac computers based on the M1 graphics processor which was released a year ago (November 2020). Also the graphics performance on the new Apple M1 computers is good, with the M1 Pro graphics (Nov 2021) about as fast as a top-of-the-line 2019 Mac Book Pro with discrete AMD Vega 20 graphics (details).
ChimeraX uses OpenGL so that it can run on Windows, Linux and macOS. Over a hundred ChimeraX crashes in the macOS OpenGL graphics driver have been reported, while almost no graphics crashes are reported on Windows and Linux which provide reliable OpenGL drivers.
Tom Goddard / September 27, 2021