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Will Apple ever release a fix for the scrolling issue?

Z

zeiter

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 19, 2008
384
3
Canada
Hello there,

I am hesitating in buying a new macbook pro because in part, of all the problems reported here from a yellow screen to sluggish UI performances etc. My last macbook pro had a yellow tint problem and I dealt with it thinking the new one would be better but now, I don't want to deal with this kind of problem.

Also, people who work @ apple in terms of software development and stuff can't test a macbook pro? I mean, it's pretty obvious that Mavericks hasn't done all the necessary to optimize itself to handle retina display screens. What is apple waiting for? Broadwell? I'm pretty pissed a $400 computer doesn't lag that much. If Apple wants to release super hidef screens, fine, but make sure it doesn't diminish user's experience.

What are your thoughts? Lag fixed in 10.9.1? or only 10.10 or never?
 
My thoughts? Stop complaining if you don't have first hand experience with the retina MacBook Pro machines.

Although there is some UI lag, I just played around with a last year 13 MBP with the resolution set to the highest scaled setting and the screen quality and overall crispness far outweighs any scrolling/UI lag!

Stop making claims unless you have first hand experience by playing and using them on a normal basis.

These forums are filled with people that specifically and artificially create/handle their laptops to manifest problems that are reported by others.

I often hope that people will go back to actually using their computers instead of focusing on the interface lag. But hey, that's me. :)
 
I bought a late 2013 rMBP and I have zero issue. No yellow screen, no scrolling issues, no lag, no freezing, no creaking, no nothing but pure awesomeness.

My husband is pissed because my new laptop gets better benchmark scores than his home built windows gaming desktop. Now I'm pissed at Apple for building such a great laptop because it means we have to spend more money so my husband's desktop can piss on my laptop. How dare they!!!

Just kidding about being pissed at Apple, but I'm not kidding that my husband was pretty damn pleased with his desktop until I got my new rMBP. He will be rebuilding his desktop so it outperforms my laptop. He's a man on a mission.

You have to know that most people who post here are posting about problems. Almost nobody posts when they're completely satisfied. It's the same with reviews. Even the best products have some quality control issues, most people will never encounter one of those problem products. The people who do will post often and post loudly. The happy ones are too busy using their new product to post.
 
v654321 said:
My thoughts? Stop complaining if you don't have first hand experience with the retina MacBook Pro machines.

Although there is some UI lag, I just played around with a last year 13 MBP with the resolution set to the highest scaled setting and the screen quality and overall crispness far outweighs any scrolling/UI lag!

Stop making claims unless you have first hand experience by playing and using them on a normal basis.

These forums are filled with people that specifically and artificially create/handle their laptops to manifest problems that are reported by others.

I often hope that people will go back to actually using their computers instead of focusing on the interface lag. But hey, that's me. :)
Click to expand...

You don't need to own one to experience the lag, just go to an Apple store and play with one for a while...and I don't try to create problems....just get over it that it's a fact! and sometimes when using your computer as you say, you experience it.
 
GrimmsGirl said:
I bought a late 2013 rMBP and I have zero issue. No yellow screen, no scrolling issues, no lag, no freezing, no creaking, no nothing but pure awesomeness. /QUOTE]
This is me, my 2012 rMBP has zero issues (knocks on wood). Its by far the best laptop I ever bought. I've owned apple laptops since back in the PPC days and I think apple hit this out of the park between, design, quality and performance.

I'm not saying no one is having issues, but with any computer there are those who are incurring issues
Click to expand...
 
Am I crazy or do I not see the scrolling problem on my late 2013? I'm very picky about scrolling lag. Especially on iDevices. I pick up a brand new top of the line samsung or whatever at a store and stop playing with it after 1 second because of the lag.

How do you get the lag on mavericks? Firefox with a few tabs opened I see/feel no lag. Is it with a particular resolution / amount of apps opened?
 
lg251 said:
Am I crazy or do I not see the scrolling problem on my late 2013? I'm very picky about scrolling lag. Especially on iDevices. I pick up a brand new top of the line samsung or whatever at a store and stop playing with it after 1 second because of the lag.

How do you get the lag on mavericks? Firefox with a few tabs opened I see/feel no lag. Is it with a particular resolution / amount of apps opened?
Click to expand...

do you use your computer in Best for retina res? Try a higher one and report back!
 
zeiter said:
do you use your computer in Best for retina res? Try a higher one and report back!
Click to expand...

I use the one right after Best for retina (which I don't remeber the exact resolution).

Ok will do that when I get home.
Is it on standard load or you guys having lag on heavy load only?
 
Just wondering, might be a bit offtopic but I'm also planning on picking up a rMP13" and could anyone make a video of the scrolling when set to a scaled 1680x1050 resolution? Preferably in Firefox or Chrome.

Might be nice to compare it to someone who also uploads a video where the scrolling issues are apperant.
 
I don't know, many people report scrolling issues with websites like Facebook and The Verge, and yet I get consistent >50 fps when scrolling on these sites. Compare this to 15-25 fps I was getting on the same sites with ML a year ago - on the same machine. Some programs will probably lag, but its a software issue - the developer should try to use more effective algorithms + Core Animation for heavy view caching.
 
I'm mostly using my 15" rMBP at 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 scaled resolutions (except Lightroom, Photoshop and Aperture, which I run at 'Best for Retina'), and using Mavericks.

Photoshop CS6 and CC: no lag
Lightroom 4: no lag
Aperture: no lag
Final Cut Pro X: no lag
iWork: no lag
iLife: no lag
Office 2011: no lag
Ableton Live 8: no lag
Reaper: no lag

Safari: minor lag in Facebook, maybe some other sites too
Mail.app: occasional lag with very large image attachments
App Store: resizing the window is choppy

And occasional rare UI animation stutter, if doing something like playing a YouTube video in Safari and swiping to switch to another desktop, while a mass export in Lightroom runs in the background.

I'm not bothered about Facebook scrolling speeds, as the computer seems to handle everything I bought it for extremely well. I don't spend much time resizing the App Store window, so I don't find that much of an issue either.

If those things bother you though, I would turn to other alternatives instead of the rMBP, at least for the time being.
 
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The computers on display at the Apple Store might not be a good indicator of performance, since they cache demo and admin programs in RAM (the 8GB machines are almost always close to full, even with few programs open). Mavericks tries to load a scrolling buffer when there's free RAM, so maybe this isn't happening on the demo models.

From my experiences, animations on the 13" are fine on 1280x800 or 1440x900, but frame rate starts to drop with 1680x1050. I don't think you can blame Apple for having lag on the higher settings when it was designed to be used at 1280x800 (13")/1440x900 for the 15", and the settings screen specifically says that the scaled settings could affect performance.
 
zeiter said:
standard!
Click to expand...

Just tried at 1680X1050 and yes I did notice a little lag in scrolling. But it still is pretty smooth. Almost not noticeable.
I'd say the only one that did show up a little more obvious frame lag, was Facebook, but still very light.
Standard load with firefox and 2-3 tabs opened.

Anyways I like 1440X900 better for my daily work and notice nothing about scrolling lag on that one either.
 
Just to directly answer the OP's topic: Yes.

Mavericks took some major steps in optimizing the scaled UI performance, but there's certainly more that can be done. The CPU still takes too much of the load while the GPU sits idle. Basically more of the rendering and animation work needs to be offloaded to the GPU, but doing this requires major rewrites to all of the UI animation code. It takes time. I'm sure there are still plenty of general optimizations to be done as well (reducing load on CPU without putting more work not the GPU, thus reducing power impact).

Microsoft has a head start on this because they've been focusing on their graphics performance for a long time. DirectX is the product of a huge focus of resources and time on improving graphics performance both at the 2D and 3D levels.

As for an assessment of the performance improvements of Mavericks, instead of giving you the details of my subjective analysis I'll just say that Anandtech is certainly going to cover that in detail during their Haswell MBP review
 
lg251 said:
Just tried at 1680X1050 and yes I did notice a little lag in scrolling. But it still is pretty smooth. Almost not noticeable.
I'd say the only one that did show up a little more obvious frame lag, was Facebook, but still very light.
Standard load with firefox and 2-3 tabs opened.

Anyways I like 1440X900 better for my daily work and notice nothing about scrolling lag on that one either.
Click to expand...

For me, 1680x1050 got worse under Mavericks compared to Mountain Lion.
1440x900 and "best for retina" got a bit better with Mavericks. But the higher scaled resolutions are noticeably worse than they used to be, on my 2012 13" rMBP. The Haswell machines I tested at the Apple store were no better. It's a software issue.
 
CausticPuppy said:
For me, 1680x1050 got worse under Mavericks compared to Mountain Lion.
1440x900 and "best for retina" got a bit better with Mavericks. But the higher scaled resolutions are noticeably worse than they used to be, on my 2012 13" rMBP. The Haswell machines I tested at the Apple store were no better. It's a software issue.
Click to expand...

and Apple's coding/OS X team aren't able to fix it? wtf is wrong with apple seriously!
 
The only scroll lag I have seen was with the 2012 rMBP 13". It was horrible.

On the 15" rMBP Haswell with Iris Pro + 750m it's super smooth so far.
 
zeiter said:
and Apple's coding/OS X team aren't able to fix it? wtf is wrong with apple seriously!
Click to expand...

It's the first version of a new operating system. Glitches like these tend to be resolved in the .1 or .2 release.... such is the life of an early adopter.

----------
UBS28 said:
The only scroll lag I have seen was with the 2012 rMBP 13". It was horrible.
Click to expand...

And that was due to software problems that were addressed a long time ago. My 2012 rMBP 13" scrolls very smoothly even on The Verge (which is the "browser scroll torture test" due to its obnoxiously busy layout). The exception being the highest scaled resolution which inexplicably got worse when I upgraded to mavericks. That still points to software.
 
laurihoefs said:
Photoshop CS6 and CC: no lag
Lightroom 4: no lag
Safari: minor lag in Facebook, maybe some other sites too
Mail.app: occasional lag with very large image attachments
App Store: resizing the window is choppy
Click to expand...

Got the i7 8Gb SSD512 13" rMBP fall 2013 version : any gfx processing software (LR, PS) cries for higher res than the "recommended for retina" setting. So I use the first upscale setting above the recommended default setting :

Lightroom 5.2 64bits : awful lag once a dozen local corrections or a couple of gradient settings have be applied. PinchToZoom with the touchpad is absolutely horrible

Photoshop CS6 64bits : PinchToZoom / pan / scroll is a bit less stuttery, but far from perfect.

Safari : lags / stutters like hell on any webpage with a fair amount of pictures (facebook, google+, any blog / news website actually)


Sure the screen is brilliant, sur I COULD say OK the stutters and lags are bareable.... but at 2K€ the go, there is NO excuse. Appalling for a premium device. Appalling from Apple even more.
 
Well, for me, the scrolling is definitely much better than with ML. Some sites were very choppy, which really isn't the case any more. So from my perspective, Apple has fixed the scrolling, at least in Safari. Maybe I'm not the pickiest person when it comes to scroll lag as I tend to read long articles...

Now UI is a different ball park, and I must say that it has gotten noticeably worse in Mavericks for scaled resolutions. The lag varies quite a lot, but is generally "acceptable" when running on the mains with discrete graphics. However, the lag is noticeably present when running on integrated graphics and this definitely wasn't the case previously with ML. The UI animations stutter ridiculously, and a fresh install hasn't helped. Even with no 3rd party software on the machine it's still there. It's very difficult to ignore it, as every UI gesture is choppy.
 
zeiter said:
and Apple's coding/OS X team aren't able to fix it? wtf is wrong with apple seriously!
Click to expand...

Seriously, what is your problem? You haven't even bought one, don't buy one if you think the "lag" is such a disaster.
 
I personally think that they shouldn't have put in scaled resolution. Everything looks the best and performs the best when it is in "Best for retina" since it doesn't have to do additional interpolation and filtering operations unlike scaled ones. I understand a lot of people want more "screen space", but until the GPUs provide hardware support for scaling from such a high resolution, there will always be a performance impact, thus the scrolling lag. Keep it at "Best for retina" and it'll be fine. :p
 
kwokaaron said:
I personally think that they shouldn't have put in scaled resolution. Everything looks the best and performs the best when it is in "Best for retina" since it doesn't have to do additional interpolation and filtering operations unlike scaled ones. I understand a lot of people want more "screen space", but until the GPUs provide hardware support for scaling from such a high resolution, there will always be a performance impact, thus the scrolling lag. Keep it at "Best for retina" and it'll be fine. :p
Click to expand...

A macbook pro 13 with retina IPS screen, an i7 and 16gb ram is not a freaking deluxe ebook reader. You've already got ipad and mbAir for reading / browsing / word processing and light stuff. The rMBP is supposed to be THE premium portable powerhouse machine for gfx / sound / video creators. Any descent software needs screen space and the "recommended" is thus absurd. Apple just foocked up again choosing such a poor GPU.
When will they at last LISTEN to their customers?...

Actually it's not about extra interpolation and filtering, it's just that the recommended setting is a cheat and what they call "upscale" seems to me like the GPU is getting fed a higher pixel count (approaching the real number the hw actually provides and the gpu should be able to cope with ). Basically apple put in this lame gpu, realized it wasn't enough, but the retina technology being one of the main selling points, they actually downscaled the default resolution. Only could Apple ever get away with such lousy optional "upscale" marketing disguise lol.

Reminds me of Sony 's famous "it's not an issue, it's a feature"
 
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