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Extreme UI Lag, Maxed-Out 5,1
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan
Suspended
That's why I asked too because what one person thinks is bad is acceptable to another person. Quartz is far from perfect but sometimes people expect it to be flawless.
Auggie
macrumors 6502
All I can say is many, many years ago with my 2008 my "seasoned" system that I had gone through multiple OS upgrades with suddenly became laggy to the point of being unusable. I tried in vain to identify the culprit. I performed both a dirty OS reinstall and a clean OS install (with migration) but the problem persisted. The only way I found to resolve the issue was to do a clean install of the OS, followed by a clean install of all apps: I did no migration whatsoever of existing apps and settings.
Painful it was as I've never had to do that with OS X; but since then, I've had to resort to starting completely from scratch a couple times, the last time of which I believe was when I was using El Capitan...
Painful it was as I've never had to do that with OS X; but since then, I've had to resort to starting completely from scratch a couple times, the last time of which I believe was when I was using El Capitan...
Squuiid
macrumors 68000
Are you using NVIDIA web drivers with your GTX680 or just native macOS drivers?
Yes, I saw quite a lot of improvement when I tried El Capitan* again out of frustration. In the future, I'll be more careful about pushing one-too-many updates onto an aging machine.
Alas, going back is a little too much trouble, and too late, at this point. My 3,1 is in imminent retirement mode. I bought a base 27" 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz I5, 512 GB SSD) to replace my 3,1 for simple office tasks (due primarily to the lag!) and its speed and general snappiness absolutely destroys my 3,1. The screen is gorgeous, too, and the total package feels refreshingly up-to-date and even fairly priced. I'm rather pleased with it.
*Correction: I meant Mavericks! Push an older Apple computer too far and you will feel some pain (as with any computer, I suppose).
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devon807
macrumors 6502
+1 To this. Try a clean install, especially if you have been upgrading over many OSes.
Agreed. I never had the time or guts to do that, but this is the way to go. Think carefully about which operating system will be your choice, as it will likely be your last.
Haven't had time to make a video yet, although as I said a couple reboots after I installed my GTX1080 seemed to improve it quite a bit. I'm away from the machine for 10 days on a vacation, so we'll see how it is when I get back. Safari is still quite slow with some sites however...in particular Google Maps is quite literally unusable...I can't zoom in or out, it basically stops working altogether. It seems to be highly site-dependent.
I use a Magic Mouse 2 for what it's worth...during all this lag, the mouse tracks fine, I've added a 6 dB antenna to my bluetooth card and it tracks extremely smoothly without lag no matter what....it seems to be purely a UI animation issue. Or did, rather. Given the spec of my machine, I still find the general lack of "snappiness" to be fairly surprising given how even the slowest machine they sell is almost entirely fluid. I get that things have changed a bit, but you'd think the raw horsepower available with this thing would allow it to covercome any optimization issues.
Haven't seen anything out of the ordinary in System Monitor, at this point I'm chalking it up to Sierra being weird. Although the improvemtrns to High Sierra are interesting, hoping that brings back the fluid UI until I decide to replace this machine.
I use a Magic Mouse 2 for what it's worth...during all this lag, the mouse tracks fine, I've added a 6 dB antenna to my bluetooth card and it tracks extremely smoothly without lag no matter what....it seems to be purely a UI animation issue. Or did, rather. Given the spec of my machine, I still find the general lack of "snappiness" to be fairly surprising given how even the slowest machine they sell is almost entirely fluid. I get that things have changed a bit, but you'd think the raw horsepower available with this thing would allow it to covercome any optimization issues.
Haven't seen anything out of the ordinary in System Monitor, at this point I'm chalking it up to Sierra being weird. Although the improvemtrns to High Sierra are interesting, hoping that brings back the fluid UI until I decide to replace this machine.
Sorta sounds like an OS quirk to me. I'd probably second a clean install, maybe even just on a test drive to see if it clears the issue before you go through the full process.
macOS previously wasn't able to use more then 96 GB RAM, however that has been changed.
cMP is triple channeled so using 3 DIMMs per CPU is faster than 4 DIMMs, but if you need the extra memory, you need the extra memory 😉
h9826790
macrumors P6
Since no one post any video to illustrate how bad the UI is. I just made a short video to show the UI performance on my cMP. So now, we can make comment base on the same video, same standard.
Mac Pro 5,1, W3690, R9 380 4GB (as per my signature), the CPU was under stress (about 90% usage on video encoding) when I capturing this video. But that generally doesn't affect the UI performance. And a Mac Pro suppose to be busy all the time anyway. So, I capture the video now, rather than wait until it has idle time.
The focus of this video is on the UI smoothness. Therefore, I use my iPhone to capture the screen rather than using Quicktime to capture the screen (which may introduce UI lag, or unable to capture everything at 60FPS). And I only use 720P to make sure the capture is smooth, which also intentionally make the details hard to read. Please only focus on the UI smoothness.
This is what I generally have, and it looks OK to me. So, please feel free to comment if it's more of less the same on your cMP. If yes, which part (e.g. which second on the video) shows the "lag" etc. May be just I am too casual about the UI, and don't care it.
Also, if you want me to test any UI performance for comparison, please let me know. However, please tell me the exact procedure on how to achieve that. e.g. I can't quite remember what is Expose, I think we only have Mission Control now. So, please tell me the exact UI / function that you are looking for.
Mac Pro 5,1, W3690, R9 380 4GB (as per my signature), the CPU was under stress (about 90% usage on video encoding) when I capturing this video. But that generally doesn't affect the UI performance. And a Mac Pro suppose to be busy all the time anyway. So, I capture the video now, rather than wait until it has idle time.
The focus of this video is on the UI smoothness. Therefore, I use my iPhone to capture the screen rather than using Quicktime to capture the screen (which may introduce UI lag, or unable to capture everything at 60FPS). And I only use 720P to make sure the capture is smooth, which also intentionally make the details hard to read. Please only focus on the UI smoothness.
This is what I generally have, and it looks OK to me. So, please feel free to comment if it's more of less the same on your cMP. If yes, which part (e.g. which second on the video) shows the "lag" etc. May be just I am too casual about the UI, and don't care it.
Also, if you want me to test any UI performance for comparison, please let me know. However, please tell me the exact procedure on how to achieve that. e.g. I can't quite remember what is Expose, I think we only have Mission Control now. So, please tell me the exact UI / function that you are looking for.
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan
Suspended
That's good but let's also remember that different applications use different SDK. Some front end are accelerated differently from other front ends.
The only two apps that I which I see sluggish resize (for example) are Logic Pro and Scrivener. You would think the second app would be responsive because it looks so simple but if you try to resize columns or a window on the newest Macs you will see it's kinda bad. Download the demo and try a test on different machines.
h9826790
macrumors P6
Yes, just try Scrivener, very bad UI performance. Feels like only 3FPS when resizing the windows.
ZombiePhysicist
Suspended
2 things to consider and try. First thing is make up a new drive with a fresh install of boot off of it and see if you have the problem. If it doesn't occur on the fresh install, it's definitely some software issue. Second undo the USB card so you may have, and only plug in a basic keyboard and mouse into the machine itself, and disconnect every other USB device. For some reason when USB starts to go, when the power supply or something on a USB device or hub starts to die, you can turn on and off for some some weird interrupt with USB bus which totally destroys the UI speed. If things speed up that way, you know you have a bad USB device.