Mountain Lion UI Lag on rMBP !!! (Let's Make this thread serious and hope for a fix)

For all of you who want a smoother browser the webkit open source project would be a nice alternative. for me it works perfectly, also on facebook 🙂

Just want to share my experience and how I eradicated the choppy animations.

Bought a brand new rMBP (2.7 ghz i7, 16GB ram, 512ssd) and wasn't happy with the choppy animations after spending a ridiculous amount on it. So, after a lot of digging I found this (don't do it yet) - How to fix Intel HD and Nvidia's choppy graphic ... - YouTube. That kinda of helped initially but I just didn't like doing something like that to my machine, so I just started again with a fresh install of ML.

I booted in recovery mode (command-R), started disk utitily and PARITIONED - not erased - my drive with 1 partition using the GUID option which is in advanced options I think. After it finished that (was super quick) I then reinstalled ML back in the recovery mode window.

Something I noticed when I initially set up my computer is that when I tried to install the updates they did appear for a while, but then stopped halfway through, I then restarted the app store to try again but the updates dissapeared. From some more digging I think,think it might be to do with apple keeping track of what updates I had previously installed (on my old mbp) so when I clean installed it this time I chose not to to log into iCloud in the installation and wait until I did all the updates the app store said I needed.

After all that my machine is now how I wanted it to be, super smooth scrolling everywhere (apart from a few websites, Facebook is definitely the worse), desktop switching, and mission control. I have disabled automatic graphics switching (I don't use it to it's full potential anyway, only running Logic, adobe suite etc) so I am using the big daddy graphics card, but everything is super smooth (espeically the option-tab application switch going to diff desktop, which really bugged me) and I'm finally happy with it.

I hope this will help some of you 🙂

thanks for tryig to help, but to be honest the reason for this ui lag is the GPU is just not strong enough to push this many pixels on this panel, simple as that ....

You can read anantech review on the mbp where he does a lot of digging into this matter, also, if you want to test if you laptop lag

Open quick time - File - New screen Recording

Press record and use your computer, try to scroll into your mail app, twitter , facebook etc... 🙂

Sorry, but I have to disagree, the GPU is more than capable of runing rMBP resolutions. If we dont consider ghosting, overeheating and other uncommon hardware problems, the main issue is the unoptimized OSX.

Running tests on more than 3 rMBP and 5+ MacBooks, they all point to the operating system. Additionally, if you run Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 on the highest resolution, you will get decent fps without much lag - surely the GPU can display a facebook page without lag. More importantly, if you manage to run your rMBP on the highest resolution without the OS optimizing it, the performance significantly improves.

Finally, the new chromebook pixel runs smooth as butter with an integrated intel GPU at 2560x1700.

Im waiting for my latest rMBP which has the new logic board and processor - will post results when I have it. Unfortunately there is no way of installing Lion on it...

well you have a point but is it running in HI DPI mode? that's the question 🙂 because I can take off HIDPI mode with quarts debug and set resolution to it's highest it runs normally ... which leads to either an un optimized OS or A GPU not capable enough to push so many pixels at such a high DPI

Also I will quote Anand from Anandtech.com on his review on this computer

At the default setting, either Intel’s HD 4000 or NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 650M already have to render and display far more pixels than either GPU was ever intended to. At the 1680 and 1920 settings however the GPUs are doing more work than even their high-end desktop counterparts are used to. In writing this article it finally dawned on me exactly what has been happening at Intel over the past few years.

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. Future iterations of the Retina Display MacBook Pro will have faster hardware with embedded DRAM that will help mitigate this problem. But there are other limitations: many elements of screen drawing are still done on the CPU, and as largely serial architectures their ability to scale performance with dramatically higher resolutions is limited.

More can be found on his complete review

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-r eview/8

Thats exactly my point, by getting rid of apple's software which "optimizes the resolution" the UX becomes much better. As previously mentioned, the chromebook pixel has an identical PPI to the 13" rMBP, and it runs everything perfectly fine.

I am in no position to argue with an editor for Anandtech and might be completely wrong, but I am 99% convinced that this is a issue with OSX optimization. It might be true that the hardware cannot cope with the resolution, and we should not expect super smooth UX, but it should be able to render and process it a lot better than it currently does.

Switching from Lion to Mountain Lion on my macbook air caused severe lag and choppines. When going back to factory settings with a fresh install of Lion, my air works like a charm. The hardware is identical, so I dont see any reasonable explanation other than the fact that Mountain Lion is poorly optimized.

Of course you can install Lion on it. My machine came with lion preinstalled...

Yes, you can install Lion if you machine is "late-2012", my machine is "early-2013" which aparently only comes with 10.8.2.

Additionally, the Lion OS that came with the retina macbook pros had a special update, so its practically impossible to get the right version.

I might be wrong however...

Yes, it's definitely HiDPI that's causing lag. I am currently connected my rMBP to a Thunderbolt display and the experience is sensational. No lag in any application whatsoever. iPhoto, Safari, Photoshop, all memory intensive apps screams. When I pinch to resize thumbnails in iPhoto there is absolutely no lag whatsoever in iPhoto.

Wow yeh some serious lag as soon as I pressed record, but I would never record my screen so it's not a problem! Mission control is still smooth as butter, application switching in a different desktop normally ok, if theres something else going on on another screen it might "chop" once but that's it. Mail srolling is fine also, but i've now noticed, and I can't be sure if this is what's causing it, but if there's an email with a large conversation then the scrolling kinda lags out when it gets there in the list... pretty rubbish, but no big deal.

I understand what people are syaing about the amount of pixels the graphics card has to cope with, but before buying this machine I so many reviews claiming that games with maxed out graphics was no problem for the computer. I would have to agree with ldjalal, it should be able to handle it, and lets face it, none of us are really ever going to know for sure....

I have faith in Apple that they will sort it out, but it is worrying that they would put out a product that's not "finished".

Last 2 weeks sometimes my rMBP (summer 2012) did some srange things with his screen. Looks like bottom half a screen blinking ? Not every time, but maybe once per day or two days, it is happening very very fast, so I even can't understand what is it ? sometimes it is happening during video playback.

Search in youtube shows me similar problem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljqBNR0l484

So I can confrim I have the same problem 😟 plus all lags, chopping etc ... I never spent so much money for nothing 😟

Wow, this seems worse than what I have.

I have this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8EVlh_wnk

Or this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60JwGNT7lj4

Or this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOTbql0mNOM

Pretty annoying I must say 😠

It's not always like this but it happens a lot. I've never seen that on any other computer.

I've the exact same problems.

They started one month or so after the purchase. Not immediately. Now they are always present.

When using Windows 8 in BootCAMP, so native install on another partition, no problems at all.

Stated that, performaces il Mountain Lion are always perfect, jut annoyng UI glitches.

This is clearly a software problem. Anxiously waiting for 10.8.3 to solve definetly this issue.

Anyone tried the new beta realese? http://9to5mac.com/2013/03/05/apple-seeds-os-x-10-8-3-mountain-lion-build-12d76- to-developers/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

I am actually surprised that no one have posted anything about how the new 10.8.3 betas deal with these problems. Are there no developers out there who do tests on these beta releases? If anyone knows anything about how 10.8.3 deals with MBPr lag issues, please post something about it in this thread 🙂