Golden Gate Beta vs. Tahoe vs. Sequoia: What is the performance like on a base M1?

[Yebubbleman]

I have one M1 13-inch MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM that is currently on Sequoia that, for the time being has to stay on Sequoia because Tahoe is considerably more sluggish. I have an M1 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM on version 26.6.2 of Tahoe. For the time being, I can't spare either to test with the current macOS Golden Gate 27.0 beta. For those that have run the Golden Gate beta on Macs with the base M1, how does the performance of it compare with Tahoe and Sequoia? Is it still more sluggish on Golden Gate than Sequoia and Sonoma, but less than Tahoe? Or is it worse on Golden Gate than Tahoe?

 

[Silvestru Hosszu]

I have a M1 Max MBP. It was on Tahoe and now on GG Beta 6, but tried all other betas.
Golden Gate is consistently better (faster and no micro stutters) than Tahoe.
Sorry but I have no computer on Sequoia to be able to make a direct comparison.

 

[aakshey]

What about memory management on 8-16 gb Macs? Does Golden Gate use similar/more memory than Tahoe for the same stuff or does it use less?

 

[Pudlo]

m1 pro 16gb
had Sequoia, Tahoe and GG
Tahoe is ok kinda but has some quirks due to UI change, Safari lags and is much slower
GG is hard to use, gets crazy slow, has problems with animations etc. has some weird memory leaks all the time
I went back to Sequoia two months ago and comparing to GG this system is flying, crazy responsive, no problems at all, safari flies too animations are fluid etc.
Probably will stay on Sequoia on this macbook forever the difference is really night and day.

My impression is like Tahoe was partly broken but GG is completely broken and they started to write the code with some AI or other bs. Like two iterations of macos and they can't repair the full screen safari side menu (yes it is still broken in newest gg beta....and this started with tahoe)

all were installed as fesh and not updates

 

[Böhme417]

m1 pro 16gb
had Sequoia, Tahoe and GG
Tahoe is ok kinda but has some quirks due to UI change, Safari lags and is much slower
GG is hard to use, gets crazy slow, has problems with animations etc. has some weird memory leaks all the time
I went back to Sequoia two months ago and comparing to GG this system is flying, crazy responsive, no problems at all, safari flies too animations are fluid etc.
Probably will stay on Sequoia on this macbook forever the difference is really night and day.

My impression is like Tahoe was partly broken but GG is completely broken and they started to write the code with some AI or other bs. Like two iterations of macos and they can't repair the full screen safari side menu (yes it is still broken in newest gg beta....and this started with tahoe)

all were installed as fesh and not updates

An interesting take. Most other things I've read don't really echo your experience.

 

[henkej]

m1 pro 16gb
had Sequoia, Tahoe and GG
Tahoe is ok kinda but has some quirks due to UI change, Safari lags and is much slower
GG is hard to use, gets crazy slow, has problems with animations etc. has some weird memory leaks all the time
I went back to Sequoia two months ago and comparing to GG this system is flying, crazy responsive, no problems at all, safari flies too animations are fluid etc.
Probably will stay on Sequoia on this macbook forever the difference is really night and day.

My impression is like Tahoe was partly broken but GG is completely broken and they started to write the code with some AI or other bs. Like two iterations of macos and they can't repair the full screen safari side menu (yes it is still broken in newest gg beta....and this started with tahoe)

all were installed as fesh and not updates

Same system, and completely opposite experience. GG is way better in every way than both Tahoe and Sequoia.

 

[WalsallSaddler]

M1 Air (8GB) on Tahoe and GG slightly more stutters.

 

[Pudlo]

Same system, and completely opposite experience. GG is way better in every way than both Tahoe and Sequoia.

yeah weird
I had GG installed as an update and it was slow, so I decided to install it fresh and it was same awful experience. Don't know why really. But it is my experience nonetheless. Maybe i will try GG when it comes out of beta but not sure about it.

Serious question: did they repair the side menu in safari in newest GG? I mean when you have Safari in full screen mode, and you open the side tab, it messes up the top of the window and you can't switch to bookmarks in the side bar etc.

Definitely my installation of GG was messed up, like my animations for mission control were crazy fast but again I did install it fresh on a new partition (beta 3 or 4 if I remember correctly) and I used beta since Mavericks and with GG it was the worst experience ever 💁 Probably it would be best to check for yourself and decide. I had it as and update and a fresh install and got same problems with GG, and again Sequoia flys comparing with GG (for me at least)

 

[JMalone]

The UI performance in all these systems you mentioned are locked to the monitor refresh. It’s one of the features of SwiftUI that you can link the UI animations to refresh rate.

If you ever see a lag or jump it’s because lots of processes have piled up on the CPU.

 

[josehill]

That sounds odd to me. I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM and a 2 TB SSD. I don't notice any particular performance difference between a Tahoe virtual machine and the Sequoia host OS.

I'm pleased with both. Subjectively, the Tahoe VM might be a little slower than Sequoia, but I can't say it's enough to notice.

Have you done things like disabling animations, reducing transparencies, etc.?

 

[Yebubbleman]

That sounds odd to me. I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM and a 2 TB SSD. I don't notice any particular performance difference between a Tahoe virtual machine and the Sequoia host OS.

I'm pleased with both. Subjectively, the Tahoe VM might be a little slower than Sequoia, but I can't say it's enough to notice.

Have you done things like disabling animations, reducing transparencies, etc.?

Nice config! Yeah, I'm definitely more concerned with native performance on a base M1 than any of the Pro/Max/Ultra variants (as I don't have them and would otherwise assume that they'd weather the newer OSes better than the base M1).