rMBP and resolutions?

[ogs]

Hey guys,

Quick question,

When i'm in the display pane in system preferences and i'm looking at different resolutions in the scaled section... it says that for any resolution that's not the native one it will impact performance.

Has anyone had any experience with this? I'm using the laptop for work in Motion.

 

[Moshe1010]

Right, because the larger the resolution, the more CPU and graphics is used by your laptop. However, the 15" rMBP is more than capable of dealing with high load work on any resolution.

 

[stevelam]

The higher you go, the slower the response in redraw of the screen. You'll see tearing/UI sluggishness/etc here and there.

 

[nontroppo]

I measured this (comparing HiDPI1440, HiDPI1920[1] and "native" 2880) quantitatively using CPU load of WindowServer during lots of window compositing and there was less than 1% difference. I also measured OpenGL performance and I get a drop from ~270FPS to 260FPS using my own code. Th stuttering I would occasionally see (which was possibly worse at HiDPI1920) when switching spaces disappeared by 10.8.2 at any resolution.

For my needs, pushing resources hard by doing computational analysis in Matlab while running multiple CS6 suite apps, 3D volume MRI rendering in OsiriX, running Office, 10s of Scientific PDFs (image heavy), Scrivener, Thunderbird and lots of browser tabs, along with numerous utilities, HiDPI1920 works perfectly.

For my needs I use HiDPI1920 as my base resolution, switching to HiDPI1440 for concentrated reading and 2880 for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop without any issues.

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[1] HiDPI1920 is the worst case scenario for OS X, it is rendering all data at 3840 x 2400 then downscaling.

EDIT, another test is to turn VSync off in Quartz debug then seeing how fast UI animations can go, but it is harder to get a reliable baseline, but there isn't much difference.