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2015 12 inch MacBook - OS X 10.11 Performance/Battery Life

ZachNathan

ZachNathan

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 25, 2014
65
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New York, NY
Discussing the performance and battery life improvements gained by running any of the betas (and eventually the official release) of OS X 10.11 El Capitan on the 2015 Retina MacBook. Supposedly there will be tremendous gains in both categories, so discuss away.
 
ZachNathan said:
Mainly concerned about Metal's affect on the GPU load, as well as any increase/decrease of battery life.
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Metal is designed to be extremely efficient, the less work it has to do on both CPU/GPU, the more it will save battery. That's the point of focusing on reducing the overhead as much as possible.

You can have the most powerful GPU at 2000 watt in the world running a task for 1 sec and still have it be more power efficient compared to an average 300watt GPU running the same task at 1 minute, especially if both GPU idles at the same power requirement level. With overhead from OpenGL and CA or others, the first GPU could run 5-10 more seconds and already wasted more power than the average one.

The more idle both CPU/GPU are, the better. Metal is what supposed to do that. That's why Mavericks had battery life, they focused on Timer Coalescing that collect most tasks in one operation to force the CPU into more idle power states.
 
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illusionmist said:
They’re not using Metal yet in this DP. Things still run on OpenGL but are apparently already smoother than Yosemite. I’m excited.
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If DP1 is without Metal i can't wait to see how smooth things get once they implement it!
DP1 is so much smoother for me (compared to 10.10.4 on rMB12"), having it get even better is just a bonus.
 
keviig said:
If DP1 is without Metal i can't wait to see how smooth things get once they implement it!
DP1 is so much smoother for me (compared to 10.10.4 on rMB12"), having it get even better is just a bonus.
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There are a lot of unconfirmed information flying around about this. First report came from netkas who used a desktop GPU that is not on Apple's list of supported GPUs, so that can't be used. There was a mention on reddit that his GPU in the laptop was using Metal in some parts.

We have to wait for a few more DPs with more debugging tools from Apple to use with Metal, it is not yet available.
 
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