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Not as smooth, why?

A

AppleGoat

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 14, 2010
655
8
Hi,

I was just watching MLB.tv (Flash-intensive) on my 2009 21.5" iMac (3.06ghz C2D, Nvidia 9400m) and noticed how much smoother it performed than my new 13" Sandy Bridge i5 MacBook Pro, which I have become accustomed to using for my Baseball-motion needs. Same browser. Why does the iMac run MLB.tv smoother if my MBP has better internals? Does it have to do with the superior driver support of the Nvidia chip? Thanks

Dan
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Your MacBook pro is not in fact sandy bridge but the old 2 core
 
MacBookPr0 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Your MacBook pro is not in fact sandy bridge but the old 2 core
Click to expand...

erm. No
 
integrated graphics?

The new 13 inch machines use Intel integrated graphics on the processor itself rather than the Nvidia GPU sharing main memory that the old ones have. For some functions this is actually an improvement but for others there is, at least so far, a real hit on performance. I've noticed with my 15 that when it's using the integrated processor rather than the Radeon chip (the 15's can do both) it's a bit choppy. So maybe you'll have to hope for software updates or graphic driver updates.

One of the strange aspects of all this is that the Apple discussions site (both old and new versions) scrolls choppily on integrated graphics on the Sandy Bridge chips in Safari. I suspect Apple hasn't had a chance to fully optimize their own hardware and web.
 
dblissmn said:
The new 13 inch machines use Intel integrated graphics on the processor itself rather than the Nvidia GPU sharing main memory that the old ones have. For some functions this is actually an improvement but for others there is, at least so far, a real hit on performance. I've noticed with my 15 that when it's using the integrated processor rather than the Radeon chip (the 15's can do both) it's a bit choppy. So maybe you'll have to hope for software updates or graphic driver updates.

One of the strange aspects of all this is that the Apple discussions site (both old and new versions) scrolls choppily on integrated graphics on the Sandy Bridge chips in Safari. I suspect Apple hasn't had a chance to fully optimize their own hardware and web.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that is what I suspected. What percentage of you thinks these updates will happen?
 
Can someone do same test with mb air 2010? Does it handle better than 3000?
 
I'm not familiar with the MLB setup. Is this a browser-based player or a dedicated app?

To my knowledge there is no GPU hardware support for the HD3000 for flash content at this point. Everything will be decoded by the CPU.

That being said, both the CPU and GPU should be faster than the C2D and NV9400 that you referenced. So there's plenty of hardware to be tapped, even if it's not yet.

If it's something you watch from a browser, try different ones.
 
AppleGoat said:
Yeah, it's browser-based, but the setup was the same for both computers.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, but wouldn't it be awesome if one browser played the content better than another on your 2011?

I was playing with 1080p flash decoding on mine and Safari/Firefox/Chrome all behaved differently.
 
Thank you all....one other quick question. When I launch the "Applications" and "Documents" stacks on the dock. Some of the files and programs launch as the placeholder before being filled in. I noticed this was faster on the other 13" i5 I had. Does this mean the new one has a slower drive?
 
AppleGoat said:
Thank you all....one other quick question. When I launch the "Applications" and "Documents" stacks on the dock. Some of the files and programs launch as the placeholder before being filled in. I noticed this was faster on the other 13" i5 I had. Does this mean the new one has a slower drive?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. If you just got your Mac or if it's a fresh install of some sort, it will show a placeholder the first time and in future uses, the stacks folder should load the correct icons.
 
Are both computers connected to the network the same way? If your MBP was connected wirelessly, and your iMac wired, that might make a big difference in the bandwidth available.
 
frankieboy said:
Are both computers connected to the network the same way? If your MBP was connected wirelessly, and your iMac wired, that might make a big difference in the bandwidth available.
Click to expand...

Both computers were connected wirelessly. However, the iMac was closer to the base station. I could always experiment and sit my MacBook right next to the iMac. I highly doubt the results would be different.
 
1. try another browser yea its odd but it could help
2. unistall reinstall flash
3. i assume your running 10.6.7 on both machines?
4. unless you did a BTO odds are the imac has a 7200rpm drive and your MBP has a 5400rpm not a huge difference but there is one.

It is always hard to compare a desktop to a laptop since laptops often use mobile processors (excpet sager/clevo's)

There will certainly be an update coming to smooth out some of the issues people are experiencing just like when snow leopard was released there were some bugs that were ironed out in updates.
 
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