2019 Mac Pro 3.5GHz 8-core and Tahoe: A tale of sluggishness

[realLucaR]

I just wanna say this one more time : iOS 26 / iPadOS 26 / macOS 26 is the only OS in my entire life that actually made me wanna roll back.

My opinion of 26 is extremely low. It honestly feels like a cheap, laggy mess. No exaggeration. Even on AS Mac it’s not smooth anymore. And on Intel Mac? Don’t even get me started.

On iOS it’s ridiculous. Like, even something as basic as Notification Center — sometimes when you expand a folded notification, it just instantly pops fully open instead of smoothly animating. That might sound minor, but it’s not. It’s sloppy. It feels fake. I don’t know how many people even notice it, but that kind of rough, half-baked behavior is enough to tell me 26 wasn’t treated with care.

If you haven’t installed 26 yet, please! don’t do something dumb. Just skip it.

What pisses me off the most is the Music app. In order to go from search to library, I have to tap TWICE instead of just having fixed menu buttons. Idiot, 100%. I have not been able to test visionOS 26 so far though.

 

[hieubui]

I’m curious to know what the Tahoe experience is like on the new A18 Pro MacBook. Would be too funny if the Mission Control animation is like 5 fps 😁

 

[galad]

The MacBook Neo has faster single core performance than the Mac Pro M2 Ultra, and better graphic drivers than the mostly broken AMD one on the Intel Mac Pro. It will be fine.

 

[SDAVE]

I have yet to experience my MP on the 6900XT which will be here any day now, right now I am using the 580X. And yes, especially the graphics performance is absolute *******.

Fully agree, booting into Windows 11 makes it as fast or even faster than some of the new Windows PCs I can buy right now, it's insane how well it runs on Windows. Not even gonna talk about Linux lol.

Have you had any issues on Windows 11 due to the TPM 2.0 requirement?

6900XT is a legit good GPU and very affordable now in the used market. I'm still surprised at the performance. I was playing Resident Evil 9 with Ray Tracing enabled and swapped out the .dll's to enable FSR4 upscaling (it comes with FSR3.5 and FSR4 is miles better) and I can run at 1440p upscaled to 4k on my 5k Studio Display at 60Hz with most max settings enabled (without Frame Generation enabled). Looks pretty nice, of course not as nice as Path Tracing if I had NVIDIA.

For TPM2.0 there were 2 games I bought and tried and it gave me an error that the system doesn't support TPM2.0 (latest Battlefield and another game I forgot the name of). I just got a refund instead. I wonder when all game devs will start implementing TPM2.0. Seems like first person shooters are first to get it. Doom Dark Ages didn't have a TPM2.0 requirement, worked great.

I looked into TPM2.0 emulation workarounds but it seems that there is no way to do it since its hardware based. The only other way is if a game is cr@cked they remove TPM2.0 afaik I read somewhere online. I always buy my games so this is a no go for me.

 

[SDAVE]

I’m curious to know what the Tahoe experience is like on the new A18 Pro MacBook. Would be too funny if the Mission Control animation is like 5 fps 😁

Tahoe will get better for M class devices and especially if potentially macOS27 is this generations performance improved Snow Leopard, it's just Intel that's left in the dust. I wouldn't be scared of Tahoe on M series.

The MacBook Neo has faster single core performance than the Mac Pro M2 Ultra, and better graphic drivers than the mostly broken AMD one on the Intel Mac Pro. It will be fine.

Totally agree, there's something borked with the AMD drivers for Intel in Tahoe.

 

[benmuetsch]

Out of curiosity and all the bad reviews I decided to test-drive Tahoe on my Mac Pro 2019 on a separate SATA drive, cheap Crucial 120GB SSD.
What should I say?! I am not a heavy multitasker on this machine as I only use the 7,1 for music production - and I only run one 1200p Display (old Cinema HD Display w/ DVI) at the moment but for me the OS runs absolutely fine, feels even snappier than Sonoma here and there (which is my main OS right now).

The only thing I found a bit glitchy: some animations are a little bit stuttery like some system popups, for example the notification when you reboot. Others like resizing/minimizing/maximizing windows, icons bouncing, all perfectly fluid.

 

[SDAVE]

Out of curiosity and all the bad reviews I decided to test-drive Tahoe on my Mac Pro 2019 on a separate SATA drive, cheap Crucial 120GB SSD.
What should I say?! I am not a heavy multitasker on this machine as I only use the 7,1 for music production - and I only run one 1200p Display (old Cinema HD Display w/ DVI) at the moment but for me the OS runs absolutely fine, feels even snappier than Sonoma here and there (which is my main OS right now).

The only thing I found a bit glitchy: some animations are a little bit stuttery like some system popups, for example the notification when you reboot. Others like resizing/minimizing/maximizing windows, icons bouncing, all perfectly fluid.

Sequoia is better than Sonoma. You can always install an OS on a new volume on your OS drive and test there, no need for another drive.

When I was on Tahoe .4 Beta it run horribly for me especially with animations and simple things like opening Finder windows or what not. Adobe creative apps (latest) ran horribly too.