2020 MacBook Air - Mission Control Animation Lag

[SirJohn871]

I recently got my 2020 i7/16gb/256 MacBook Air and noticed that, while it's very responsive generally, when I use the touchpad to gesture to launch mission control, the animation has will occasionally stutter and drop frames.

It's not subtle to me, though I'm sure many people may not notice it. If it's normally 60FPS, it looks like it may be 30FPS which, to me, is a huge drop. Is anyone else experiencing this? There are no background tasks running and everything has finished indexing. I've updated to 10.15.5 and it hasn't helped. The processor isn't maxed at any point and I have plenty of RAM to spare.

I've noticed that it is more likely to happen when I haven't launched mission control in a while, almost as if the OS has to re-draw the windows and that causes it to drop the FPS for the animation. It appears smooth after that. Scrolling is fine.

I wasn't expecting to see this with the specs of my machine. I would be willing to return the MBA and get a MBP if that solves the issue, so any advice or help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[FNH15]

I recently got my 2020 i7/16gb/256 MacBook Air and noticed that, while it's very responsive generally, when I use the touchpad to gesture to launch mission control, the animation has will occasionally stutter and drop frames.

It's not subtle to me, though I'm sure many people may not notice it. If it's normally 60FPS, it looks like it may be 30FPS which, to me, is a huge drop. Is anyone else experiencing this? There are no background tasks running and everything has finished indexing. I've updated to 10.15.5 and it hasn't helped. The processor isn't maxed at any point and I have plenty of RAM to spare.

I've noticed that it is more likely to happen when I haven't launched mission control in a while, almost as if the OS has to re-draw the windows and that causes it to drop the FPS for the animation. It appears smooth after that. Scrolling is fine.

I wasn't expecting to see this with the specs of my machine. I would be willing to return the MBA and get a MBP if that solves the issue, so any advice or help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I see this sometimes on my 15” 2018. but only when using the Intel 630UHD. When using the Radeon 560X, it doesn’t happen -and it damn well shouldn’t given that GPU’s power! Lower-end UHD graphics, I’ve found, won’t always deliver 100% smooth animations 100% of the time. In my case, the stutters happen when memory load is high - after all, iGPU memory is shared with system RAM.

I never saw this on my older 2013 15” with Iris Pro graphics, and my mum’s 2019 13" with Iris Pro 645 graphics doesn’t do it either. Both of those machines have a small amount of dedicated memory for the iGPU, in the form of eDRAM (128MB). Your machine, even through the brand name is “Iris Plus," doesn’t have any dedicated GPU memory - hence the occasional stuttering.

 

[SirJohn871]

I see this sometimes on my 15” 2018. but only when using the Intel 630UHD. When using the Radeon 560X, it doesn’t happen -and it damn well shouldn’t given that GPU’s power! Lower-end UHD graphics, I’ve found, won’t always deliver 100% smooth animations 100% of the time. In my case, the stutters happen when memory load is high - after all, iGPU memory is shared with system RAM.

I never saw this on my older 2013 15” with Iris Pro graphics, and my mum’s 2019 13" with Iris Pro 645 graphics doesn’t do it either. Both of those machines have a small amount of dedicated memory for the iGPU, in the form of eDRAM (128MB). Your machine, even through the brand name is “Iris Plus," doesn’t have any dedicated GPU memory - hence the occasional stuttering.

Wow, so you're saying that if I'm looking to eliminate this issue, I need to get a MBP with eDRAM? That would mean the 8th generation CPU models since the 10th generation models also have Intel Iris Plus graphics that lacks eDRAM.

If that's the root of the issue, then that's a huge fail on Intel/Apple's part.

 

[FNH15]

Wow, so you're saying that if I'm looking to eliminate this issue, I need to get a MBP with eDRAM? That would mean the 8th generation CPU models since the 10th generation models also have Intel Iris Plus graphics that lacks eDRAM.

If that's the root of the issue, then that's a huge fail on Intel/Apple's part.

Honestly, I’m not sure if its the root of your issue, specifically - you don’t mention that you’re running out of system memory. Furthermore, the 10th gen iGPU is supposed to be 2x faster, so I don’t know if that would make a material difference. I’ve not used a 2020 machine myself yet.

Are you on 10.15.5? When the 1st Retina machines came out (I had one, the 2012 Retina 15”), it took a few OS updates to smooth out the GPU on those machines- although the iGPU (Intel HD4000) was still underpowered, it didn’t lag in light / general use. If you’re not on the latest revision of Catalina, you might try updating to see if it fixes the issue.

Given the specs of your machine, though, it sounds like you might fit the bill of a “Pro” user, what with the i7 + 16GB RAM. In any event, the thermal design of the Pro should be more advantageous for CPU intensive workloads - it can sustain max CPU clock speeds longer than the Air.

 

[RiaKoobcam]

I recently got my 2020 i7/16gb/256 MacBook Air and noticed that, while it's very responsive generally, when I use the touchpad to gesture to launch mission control, the animation has will occasionally stutter and drop frames.

It's not subtle to me, though I'm sure many people may not notice it. If it's normally 60FPS, it looks like it may be 30FPS which, to me, is a huge drop. Is anyone else experiencing this? There are no background tasks running and everything has finished indexing. I've updated to 10.15.5 and it hasn't helped. The processor isn't maxed at any point and I have plenty of RAM to spare.

I've noticed that it is more likely to happen when I haven't launched mission control in a while, almost as if the OS has to re-draw the windows and that causes it to drop the FPS for the animation. It appears smooth after that. Scrolling is fine.

I wasn't expecting to see this with the specs of my machine. I would be willing to return the MBA and get a MBP if that solves the issue, so any advice or help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey SirJohn,

I noticed the same issue (dropped frames, very chuggy animations) when I was switching rapidly back and forth between Windows/MacOS on my Macbook Air. When you're using MacOS exclusively, you just get used to it, but after using Windows 50% of the time I started really noticing that almost every UI function was slower and much lower from a framerate perspective.

I don't think it's a hardware issue (Windows has been able to do smooth animations on Macbook Air hardware back to my first model, the 2013). For whatever reason, it's a MacOS issue. It's weird, because Apple normally prioritises this kind of detail, especially in iOS and iPadOS, but I wasn't able to find a fix. Even 'Apple optimised' apps like Safari suffer from this.

This is the only information I was able to find about others experiencing the issue: no fix found unfortunately, but you're not going crazy, others have the same issue on hardware that should be perfectly capable of doing this smoothly without looking like a stop motion film.

I put in a MacOS feedback form saying 'hey, your base operating system is running at low FPS and it shouldnt need a dGPU to maximise a window, please fix' but you know, doubt that'll change anything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9kp37x

 

[edubfromktown]

I’ve used OS X since 10.1 and totally dug text mode vty’s in Linux (since before or around the time when the 1.0 kernel was released).

I switched between them (and the console) using Ctrl-function keys across the top of the keyboard and I guess got hard wired that way.

In OS X and macOS I use Ctrl-left or right arrows to switch between the ~4-5 desktops that I typically use. Expose or Mission Control never caught my interest and I’m not really sure what else they do.

You may want to try tidying things up with Maintenance https://titanium-software.fr/en/maintenance.html

Or use a more aggressive approach with Onyx to see if that helps your lackluster performance. https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html