Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,913
Let's discuss what fixes for the rMBP the 10.8.3 brings. What I noticed (15" rMBP):

1. Most notably - Mission Control. On 10.8.2, dragging items (like big images) between applications was very choppy with Mission Control, now its extremely smooth.

2. Safari seems slightly faster. No idea whether they fixed the input boxes and garbled rendering.

3. Wake-up from sleep seems to be much snappier (on 10.8.2, it took longer to wake up from sleep than to actually boot the machine).

P.S. There still seems to be slight input lag in Safari :/
 

walkie

macrumors 6502
Feb 13, 2010
331
3
Ok I will continue in this thread:

My findings:

- Safari is snappier but WebKit is still faster than Safari, it seems Safari doesn't include the latest version of WebKit.

- People suffering from fan craziness have reported that this issue is gone with the firmware update.

- Scrolling speed in any other apps remains the same (I'm still testing), I haven't found any speed gain.


I'm still testing this update on my 15" retina if I found something else I will report it here later,

Feel free to continue this list by adding new improvements on the rMBP.
 

ppone

macrumors regular
Sep 1, 2011
178
0
In addition to what you wrote, I see more memory usage by system processes like kernel_task.


Ok I will continue in this thread:

My findings:

- Safari is snappier but WebKit is still faster than Safari, it seems Safari doesn't include the latest version of WebKit.

- People suffering from fan craziness have reported that this issue is gone with the firmware update.

- Scrolling speed in any other apps remains the same (I'm still testing), I haven't found any speed gain.


I'm still testing this update on my 15" retina if I found something else I will report it here later,

Feel free to continue this list by adding new improvements on the rMBP.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Original poster
Oct 14, 2008
19,152
18,913
Now this is rather exiting: the new graphics drivers for 650M have been improved massively. In the Unigine Valley benchmark, I used to get around 5 fps with 10.8.2, and now its over 20 fps! Guild Wars 2 - despite being a beta cider port, runs with 40-50 fps at 1920-1200 high settings now (used to be under 20) - which makes it almost on par with the Windows version. It still lags occasionally, but the improvement is tremendous. The game is actually very playable now at 1680x1050 - which is excellent news for everyone who want to play games in OS X.
 

MikesGravity

macrumors 6502
Oct 29, 2008
450
153
Southeast MI
I will second that Mission Control, Safari and everything in general seems smoother overall after the update WITH automatic Graphics switching ON. With it off, the thing is butter smooth.
 

KingArthurVI

macrumors regular
Dec 17, 2011
242
23
Penang, Malaysia
Hello, I just had a very frustrating episode of fan-blasting on campus just now.

I got my rMBP out from my bag and wake it from sleep (yes it wakes up much faster now!), when I got past my password screen, the fan blasted full-on. It was SO embarrassing since I was in a small lecture hall. I had iStat so I know the temp then was 34C, usually the fan would only turn on past 47C. So I was like WTF I thought the SMC update addressed this issue. In the end I had to manually reset SMC again.

On the good side, the Mac wakes up much faster now, Safari feels smoother scrolling on content-heavy pages like 9gag.com, and for some reason I don't know, this affects apps like Reeder as well (it used to suffer from some serious scroll lag), I think it's because of the GPU driver improvements they made. Finally, like others have pointed out, Mission Control is sweet now :)
 

bill-p

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2011
2,884
1,545
Battery life has improved for me.

Prior to 10.8.3, executing a GPU intensive task (Photoshop?) would bring battery estimates down to 3.5 - 4 hours at most. Now it's saying I get an extra hour.

When there is no GPU usage required (HD 4000 takes over), it's reporting 5.5 hours left at 68%, which is the same as when I was at 100% in 10.8.2.

So it's looking like I'm getting an extra hour or two of use, which is awesome!

Also temperature under Bootcamp is kept under 80C for GPU and 90C for CPU, but fan noise is inevitable.

Under Mac OSX, GPU is kept under 95C for me... in exchange for less fan noise.

In both cases, it's much less noise than my old 2011 MBP.
 

akdj

macrumors 65816
Mar 10, 2008
1,186
86
62.88°N/-151.28°W
Ok I will continue in this thread:

My findings:

- Safari is snappier but WebKit is still faster than Safari, it seems Safari doesn't include the latest version of WebKit.

- People suffering from fan craziness have reported that this issue is gone with the firmware update.

- Scrolling speed in any other apps remains the same (I'm still testing), I haven't found any speed gain.


I'm still testing this update on my 15" retina if I found something else I will report it here later,

Feel free to continue this list by adding new improvements on the rMBP.

I've found a few differences than you. M/C seems to have improved significantly. The Verge, ArsTech, and F/B scrolling is now fluid. Waking from sleep is immediate. I'm not a huge gamer, though I do play Diablo 3. I'll test this weekend.

I'm happy with the scrolling 'chop' being gone. Tech Crunch still can be bit laggy---no more than my iMac (2011) or MBA (2012)---so other than a software fix from the site itself, I think Apple has done some significant graphic updates with this revision. I'm very happy!

J
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.