UI performance in rMBP

[x_kzy_xd]

I've read anand's review and am very concerned by what. He said about the Ji performance given the high resolutions of this notebook. I don't play games or do anything graphics intensive (some very light photoshop at most).

But the one thing that I do care about is lag. I just can't stand lag when scrolling web pages or moving windows around. I do a lot of multitasking, upwards of 70 tabs open across a number of browser windows, a few word/pages doc, etc. Wll I see UI lag on a 2.6ghz 16gb rMBP?

 

[0roo0roo]

generally lag is their first priority, its why apple stuff even with retina had no lag compared to androids infamous lag on lower res.

kinda doubt two dimensional desktop even at 5mp is hard for todays gpu's, games are ridiculously harder than rendering a desktop now.

anyways reported system is snappy, esp since the ssd is so fast, and generally desktop "lag" is down to system waiting on harddrives.

 

[Subyman]

generally lag is their first priority, its why apple stuff even with retina had no lag compared to androids infamous lag on lower res.

kinda doubt two dimensional desktop even at 5mp is hard for todays gpu's, games are ridiculously harder than rendering a desktop now.

anyways reported system is snappy, esp since the ssd is so fast, and generally desktop "lag" is down to system waiting on harddrives.

Did you read the Anandtech article? The rMBP does have issues with drawing that screen size, especially when surfing sites such as facebook.


From the article:

To be quite honest, the hardware in the rMBP isn’t enough to deliver a consistently smooth experience across all applications. At 2880 x 1800 most interactions are smooth but things like zooming windows or scrolling on certain web pages is clearly sub-30fps. At the higher scaled resolutions, since the GPU has to render as much as 9.2MP, even UI performance can be sluggish. There’s simply nothing that can be done at this point - Apple is pushing the limits of the hardware we have available today, far beyond what any other OEM has done.

...

Some elements of drawing in Safari for example aren’t handled by the GPU. Quickly scrolling up and down on the AnandTech home page will peg one of the four IVB cores in the rMBP at 100%

...

Throw a more complex website at it and things get bad quickly. Facebook combines a lot of compressed images with text - every single image is decompressed on the CPU before being handed off to the GPU. Combine that with other elements that are processed on the CPU and you get a recipe for choppy scrolling.

While last year’s MBP delivered anywhere from 46 - 60 fps during this test [facebook scrolling], the rMBP hovered around 20 fps (18 - 24 fps was the typical range).



....


Whereas I would consider the rMBP experience under Lion to be borderline unacceptable, everything is significantly better under Mountain Lion. Don’t expect buttery smoothness across the board, you’re still asking a lot of the CPU and GPU, but it’s a lot better.


With the Retina MacBook Pro I get the distinct impression it was launched before the software was ready to support it.

 

[runawayprisoner]

I had some hands-on time with an rMBP earlier, and I can confirm Anand's findings. The rMBP just feels very laggy compared to my Early 2011 MBP 15" w/ quad-core i7 2.0GHz.

 

[x_kzy_xd]

So the bottleneck is more CPU than GPU?

 

[edup]

as an owner of a RMBP 15 I can tell you guys that this is the worst product I have ever purchased from apple and the worst computer I've ever bought, the lag is crazy while scrolling specially on websites like facebook, twitter etc... and with a tag price of $2,500 this is totally unacceptable

as a matter of fact we have opened a huge thread on apple forum asking for a fix or something

https://discussions.apple.com/message/20698656?ac_cid=tw123456#20698656

 

[dagamer34]

So the bottleneck is more CPU than GPU?

It ends up being a CPU bottleneck because the GPU wasn't designed to handle such high resolutions. Also, the CPU has to decode images that are 4x in size.

 

[JAG87]

It is a browser problem, just get the latest webkit build and the scrolling in Safari is super smooth on any website.

Haven't really noticed any other UI lag, besides a few windows lagging when manually re-sizing them, doesn't really bother me though. The scrolling lag is what was terrible. Hopefully the webkit fix gets pushed into Chrome as well.

 

[Kadarin]

I just ordered a 15" rMBP; will update once I get a chance to play with it next week.

 

[ubercaffeinated]

I've had the rMBP since August, and I haven't had any UI lag that some people have reported. I'm wondering what resolution setting their machines are set on because by default it should be on "scaled best for retina". I've only ever run Mountain Lion on this machine, but it's been a buttery smooth ride for me and I'm pretty intolerant to UI lag.

I suspect the UI lag can get real bad when the resolution is scaled to the far right - however at the default "scaled best for retina", that just don't happen. Also, my default browser is Chrome, so I don't know how much rendering lag there'd be in Safari - but that'd be a Safari problem and we all know it's a POS browser.

 

[Tyranicus]

I've had a 15" retina MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks now, and I really don't notice lag issues. Others have mentioned lag on Facebook, but I have not seen it. It stutters a little as it loads more posts at the bottom of the page while scrolling, but it did that on my late 2008 MacBook Pro as well.

 

[Syrome]

It is a browser problem, just get the latest webkit build and the scrolling in Safari is super smooth on any website.

Haven't really noticed any other UI lag, besides a few windows lagging when manually re-sizing them, doesn't really bother me though. The scrolling lag is what was terrible. Hopefully the webkit fix gets pushed into Chrome as well.

You are 100% correct sir. This issue of UI Scrolling is 100% a Browser Issue. A Webkit build came out about a few weeks ago now and it has totally solved this problem. I ran into the Apple Store myself to test this and for sure my results were reflected accordingly. Facebook, CNN, along with some of my personal blog sites were all sub 30 FPS on scrolling, but with the Webkit build, I am hitting well over 50+ FPS. The CPU is plenty powerful even though it wasn't typically designed for such an increase in resolution and same goes for the GPU. Apple by default overclocked the GT 650M inside the machine at 900 MHZ which is honestly enough to power almost everything you can throw at it besides obvious high end gaming. Granted, Apple could have definitely put a more powerful GPU inside but nonetheless, the 650M is quite capable.

 

[JAG87]

You are 100% correct sir. This issue of UI Scrolling is 100% a Browser Issue. A Webkit build came out about a few weeks ago now and it has totally solved this problem. I ran into the Apple Store myself to test this and for sure my results were reflected accordingly. Facebook, CNN, along with some of my personal blog sites were all sub 30 FPS on scrolling, but with the Webkit build, I am hitting well over 50+ FPS. The CPU is plenty powerful even though it wasn't typically designed for such an increase in resolution and same goes for the GPU. Apple by default overclocked the GT 650M inside the machine at 900 MHZ which is honestly enough to power almost everything you can throw at it besides obvious high end gaming. Granted, Apple could have definitely put a more powerful GPU inside but nonetheless, the 650M is quite capable.

Of course. Anyone thinking that it's insufficient hardware performance doesn't know what they are talking about. Current hardware has the capability of drawing 2D in both Windows and OSX at FAR higher resolutions than the retina display. And no, the rMBP does not render at twice the resolution and downscale like some forum warriors believe, it just renders at 2x the DPI. The scaling only kicks in if you are using a resolution other than 2880x1800, and even then rendering performance is barely affected. So yea the internet scrolling lag is a browser problem, not a hardware problem.

 

[Kadarin]

Just got my rMBP today; no lag issues of any sort here that I've noticed so far.