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

Macbook Pro 15" Early 2011 - Slowdown with minimal usage

P

Pjstock42

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 15, 2010
153
18
Just looking for some input on this.

I just received my 15" MBP i7 2.0ghz, SSD, 4gb ram last week.

When I have the game "minecraft" open, I can barely scroll around webpages in safari or chrome when i minimize it. minecraft is not really a demanding game and i could minimize minercaft and multitask fine with my old acer ferrari one netbook that i had before this.

I'm just not understanding why there would be such significant slowdown on a brand new $2000 machine when I'm barely stressing it at all.

Any help?
 
I dont think thats the case.

This has happened each day I've owned the machine.

Only Chrome and Minecraft opened, extreme slowdown with minecraft minimized, can barely scroll through web pages and the dock is laggy.
 
it happens because the dedicated graphics card isn't turning on. I have the same issue with Minecraft and WoW (i.e : they'll work once, close them off, come back to them later in the day and they'll use the integrated gfx card).

very annoying problem. A reboot is the only thing that fixes it
 
Drecca said:
it happens because the dedicated graphics card isn't turning on. I have the same issue with Minecraft and WoW (i.e : they'll work once, close them off, come back to them later in the day and they'll use the integrated gfx card).

very annoying problem. A reboot is the only thing that fixes it
Click to expand...

Hmm, I see in energy options you can turn off automatic graphics switching and itll stay on the dedicated card permanently with that option disabled (i think).

I'll try and see if that works.
 
Pjstock42 said:
Hmm, I see in energy options you can turn off automatic graphics switching and itll stay on the dedicated card permanently with that option disabled (i think).

I'll try and see if that works.
Click to expand...

Try looking for a software called gfxcardstatus. No clue why apple doesn't include something so simple and useful in their OS
 
Pjstock42 said:
Just looking for some input on this.

I just received my 15" MBP i7 2.0ghz, SSD, 4gb ram last week.

When I have the game "minecraft" open, I can barely scroll around webpages in safari or chrome when i minimize it. minecraft is not really a demanding game and i could minimize minercaft and multitask fine with my old acer ferrari one netbook that i had before this.

I'm just not understanding why there would be such significant slowdown on a brand new $2000 machine when I'm barely stressing it at all.

Any help?
Click to expand...
Normal behaviour if this annoys you go complain to notch its a Minecraft bug not the Macbook Pro This Happens on every computer i have used including a Mac Pro
 
Oh and Minecraft may not be that demanding but it still uses 1.2GHz of your CPU when just walking around and will guzzle ram like mad, unfortunately this as i said above is not a problem with your computer but just how minecraft is coded abit like alot of things notch does ;(
PS: You wouldn't have noticed that many bad thigns unless your a server admin
 
hehe299792458 said:
Try looking for a software called gfxcardstatus. No clue why apple doesn't include something so simple and useful in their OS
Click to expand...

Downloaded this, switched to discrete only and it does seem to be making a difference, thank you very much for the suggestion.

For people blaming the coding of the game, I assume youre just talking about the Mac version? Because I've ben running Minecraft and multitasking fine on windows machines with less than half the power of this MBP with no issues.
 
Pjstock42 said:
Downloaded this, switched to discrete only and it does seem to be making a difference, thank you very much for the suggestion.

For people blaming the coding of the game, I assume youre just talking about the Mac version? Because I've ben running Minecraft and multitasking fine on windows machines with less than half the power of this MBP with no issues.
Click to expand...

The game code is partially to blame, but really it's Apple's (or has Oracle finally taken it over now?) implementation of Java in OSX. It's unfortunate, and I really wish there was a better way than booting to a different OS to play for right now. I play on my Mac with my graphics on fast (view distance still set to far) and smooth lighting off (I prefer "rough" lighting anyway) and it works fine for the most part, so long as I'm not playing on my external display. That's what my desktop is for.

Notch has stated that the game won't be fully optimized until release, but rather he will optimize as he continues to build the game. However, these issues aren't the major factor in the game performance on OSX. It does however cause issues for SMP admins :/
 
Whenever a piece of software doesn't run as good on Macs people always blame it on the software, seems to me the one common link in all these problems is OS X.
 
Looon said:
Whenever a piece of software doesn't run as good on Macs people always blame it on the software, seems to me the one common link in all these problems is OS X.
Click to expand...

Totally dude. OSX is so unstable and buggy. Dont even think about running any "profesional" applications on it, just asking for trouble!
 
87am said:
Totally dude. OSX is so unstable and buggy. Dont even think about running any "profesional" applications on it, just asking for trouble!
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone is stating that. I'm just trying to say that the Java implementation in OSX is pretty poor, which I would imagine is why Apple handed that responsibility off to Oracle.

OSX is great, there are just some issues with 3rd party libraries and API's such as Java that need to be worked out.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

c1phr said:
Pjstock42 said:
Downloaded this, switched to discrete only and it does seem to be making a difference, thank you very much for the suggestion.

For people blaming the coding of the game, I assume youre just talking about the Mac version? Because I've ben running Minecraft and multitasking fine on windows machines with less than half the power of this MBP with no issues.
Click to expand...

The game code is partially to blame, but really it's Apple's (or has Oracle finally taken it over now?) implementation of Java in OSX. It's unfortunate, and I really wish there was a better way than booting to a different OS to play for right now. I play on my Mac with my graphics on fast (view distance still set to far) and smooth lighting off (I prefer "rough" lighting anyway) and it works fine for the most part, so long as I'm not playing on my external display. That's what my desktop is for.

Notch has stated that the game won't be fully optimized until release, but rather he will optimize as he continues to build the game. However, these issues aren't the major factor in the game performance on OSX. It does however cause issues for SMP admins :/
Click to expand...

PS: I'm a server admin :S
 
Java Settings

I believe that the default maximum ram allocation for a java application on osx is 512 megabytes... Try running minecraft natively instead of in the browser, and try to find the java control panel. There should be a setting in there similar to the command used to run the server under linux.

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -cp Minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame
Click to expand...
--from minecraft.net

Change the 512MB to 1024, and you should see drastically better performance.

Sorry I can't be of more help... Waiting on my replacement MBP. 4 hours of waiting for the Fed-Ex flight from shanghai to arrive in memphis :eek:
 
87am said:
Totally dude. OSX is so unstable and buggy. Dont even think about running any "profesional" applications on it, just asking for trouble!
Click to expand...

LOL! You know that I sometimes read the threads just for comedy.

Yeah dude I do ALL of my work on my Macs. Everything from web designing, word processing and spreadsheets. The OSX hasn't failed me yet.

As for this thread, have you installed 10.6.7 for the 2011 MBP's yet?
 
systole said:
I believe that the default maximum ram allocation for a java application on osx is 512 megabytes... Try running minecraft natively instead of in the browser, and try to find the java control panel. There should be a setting in there similar to the command used to run the server under linux.

--from minecraft.net

Change the 512MB to 1024, and you should see drastically better performance.

Sorry I can't be of more help... Waiting on my replacement MBP. 4 hours of waiting for the Fed-Ex flight from shanghai to arrive in memphis :eek:
Click to expand...


There is a way, if you right click the Minecraft.app and show package contents. Then go to the "info.plist" file and edit it with a text editor, near the bottom there is a value which reads similar to

"<string>-Xms1536M -Xmx1536M</string>"

Near the bottom of the file. As you can see, mine is edited to allocate 1.5gb. There is definitely a difference when playing single player, but I didn't notice a drastic change in multiplayer personally.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back