rMBP Scroll Lag: ML vs Windows 8!

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I started the last thread on this, and I've tried some things. Here's what's worked: instead of using safari, I'm using the latest build of chrome. Scrolling is better, uniformly, across all the web pages that were giving me fits. But, and this is a big clue possibly, when I resize by dragging my fingers (not tapping, but doing it with the sweep gesture), chrome "clicks" between different zooms. It is NOT smooth / continuous, and you have only a few options it will force you into. Safari, in contrast, lets you choose any level of zoom you want.

Chrome, once it clicks into place with what it determines is the allowed level of zoom, scrolls just fine. Safari will let you choose any level, but hangs, and then doesn't scroll fine even after it renders.

Cool.

Thanks for the win info -- what's battery life like? Any heat problems?

 

Please read Anandtech's article here. You'll see that in OSX to make everything look super smooth, everything is upsampled and then downsampled to achieve the highest quality. Win7/8 don't do this.

 

Ok i'm going to make this really simple. In bootcamp, macs use their dedicated graphics card ONLY. In OSX, macs switch automatically between dedicated graphics (fast) and integrated graphics (slow but power efficient). In addition, if you use a scaled resolution in OSX of above 1440x900, you tax the computer even further and start rendering beyond native resolution to compensate. It is no surprise that it runs great in windows because it is running the dedicated gpu 100% of the time and does not render above native resolution. Also, You will also notice that the battery life in windows is cut in half and it runs hotter because the dedicated gpu is on 100% of the time.

 

That's only if you don't use the best for retina scaling. At the best for retina it doesn't upsample. Apple has messed up and they need to fix their OS asap.

 

Good to know, Thanks. So if you don't care about battery life (on A/C power), it is better to go with dedicated GPU?

 

How come I never notice any choppiness when using Chrome under ML?

Also, captain, how did you overcome the buggy Boot Camp app under Win 8, which prevents one from making changes to the trackpad (enable clicking by tapping) etc? It crashes when I try to launch it.

 

No, the integrated GPU is absolutely fine and easily cabable of running retina resolution. It is a driver issue which will hopefully be fixed soon. The lag IS annoying.

 

Maybe you missed this part:

 

Windows 8 is simply rendering in native resolution.

the retina display upscales everything, shrinks it back down to 2x the "resolution" you select in your display settings and then draws it on the screen. OS X icons are masively more detailed as well (zoom into some of them some time and see).

Now i don't have an rMBP to compare, but retina mode under OS X makes the hardware do a lot more work than simply rendering to native resolution in Windows 7 or 8.

 

Not on "best for Retina" resolution - in that case it can draw "natively" at 2x and doesn't do any non-integer scaling.

I think it's a driver problem, but I suppose it could also be a WebKit bug. Chrome could just be better optimised (pre-rendering etc). I definitely think its fixable with a SW update; I'm just less sure if Apple will actually do it or not.

 

It will be more interesting to see "when" they decide to do it if they eventually decide to fix it and not consider it a "non-issue" ( it's something "normal" ). I doubt they can avoid it forever, eventually, they'll have to optimize it...

 

Apple have been terrible at keeping their graphics drivers up to date, I have little faith they will fix things that are just about good enough. The visual perception research community used to choose OS X as the best OS with which to do research, but a growing collection of OpenGL bugs is causing more and more scientists to abandon OS X. These bugs are logged on Radar, but unless a big user like Adobe or Valve complains, GPU bugs just sit unfixed.

As most complaints seem to focus on web browsers, lets hope this is just optimisation of the way image decoding occurs during page layout, rather than anything lower level. Luckily I don't see any lag or stutter...

 

There are some software bugs through browsers which result in lower performance in OS X HiDPI mode. There has been some threads (which I can't find now) quoting known Chrome bug reports which explained the issue (had something to do with image cache - for some websites, Chrome would perform some very expensive operations for no real reason when in HiDPI mode). Similarly, may applications are badly coded (slow UI buildup) - Apple's own App Store is a prime example for this. As previously mentioned, OS X uses a supersampling approach, so its more sensitive to these things than simple scaling as done by Windows. And its still possible that OS X itself has some bugs which result in lower performance. There are probably still plenty of opportunities to further optimise it.

 

My experience is that Safari scrolls much more smoothly than Chrome on my rMBP.

 

Also, I'm an avid Chrome user and I promote chrome to clients. But, using newest safari pretty much eliminated the scroll lag on my RMBP. I have 2.3/16gig version and have had it since 2 weeks after launch and I can say safari is ALOT smoother(if that is even a word).

 

I finally did some more or less systematic benchmarks on this. Please see

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1485117

Could similar be done for Windows? Are there some developer tools monitoring the FPS?

 

These high resolution displays really bring out the difference between Windows and other OSes. Windows has been architecturally superior for years and Windows 8 has improved performance even further. It has the lowest input to output latency of any OS by far. It never stutters or freezes ever even on a mechanical HDD, while OS X stutters even on an SSD. It's 5 years ahead of everything else, like iOS was 5 years ahead of everything when it launched.

The only apps which lag on Windows are substandard apps like Chrome. IE scrolls at 120 fps. All Adobe tools are vastly superior on Windows performance wise. If you want a quality laptop, buy a MBP and install Windows 8. All other non-Apple laptops are utter garbage with pathetic battery life, horrible proprietary drivers and hardware with OEM PIDs/VIDs, hideous design, etc.

 

Yes Windows is faster and at full res has to render just as many pixels. The down scaling OSX does should not require any significant resources. That is a cheap operation processing wise and especially wouldn't spike, it is constant load.

But Windows on multiple displays is still not great. The ground work is there but developers don't fix their programs with high res displays still being such a small percentage of sold notebooks. Apple changes their line up and every dev tries to fix their stuff. It is the only line sold.
While there are quite a few high res options now, in volume they are still few and many programs (on the normal desktop) don't play nice.
In Chrome you have to set the hiDPI setting in chrome://flags to get it to render correctly, which still doesn't switch on on its own for some reason.

Performance on OSX isn't always what it should be but it does work better overall. Not really anything Microsoft can change other than lay the ground work but still the fact remains. Modern UI is great in performance and resolution independence but it still isn't Windows it is just a tablet mode that has limited to no use to most people because it isn't as productive as the desktop side with its much better programs.

 

This is an old thread.... Mavericks eliminated what was left of the scroll lag with the 10.9.2 update.