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

As of May 8, the laggy UI problem remains intact. I had my first rMBP replaced after two weeks and the replacement (one week old) is just about the same. Just wonder whether we will see any improvement in the next Mac OS X iteration. I sincerely hope so very much.

In the meantime, I guess I will just have to get used to it.

Am'I the only one who have solved the issue?

I've no more lags of any kind after the trick. Done once, everything now is fine like new.

Sorry, which trick are you referring to? Cheers

Credits for this solution to user elmath

To immediately solve the UI Lag just download and launch  "Graphics Tools for Xcode - January 2013" from "https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action" if you have a developer account, or from somewhere else.

Launch Quartz Debug and immediately you will see all UI problems disappear.

You can close Quartz Debug. Problems finished. UI Lag gone. Enjoy your rMBP, finally!

Have a nice day!

@ammiraglio

You say NO lag!?

Please try to swipe with two fingers to flick trough months in iCal and tell us if it is butter smooth as its soposed to be and you still do not have any lag!

Tried this but no diffrence at all.

This trick does absolutely nothing for me! Are there really people out there for whom this solves everything?

As for the Calendar animation I have seen one single 15" rMBP in one Apple store in Denmark that does this butter smooth. My own machine, and all other machines out display in other stores around the country, are laggy as ****.

The biggest issue that I experience with the 15" rMBP is scrolling in PDF documents - especially when opening a PDF through Safari. If the document contains just a small amount of pictures, the scrolling becomes extremely laggy and if I zoom in and then try to scroll around I get up to several seconds of delay before anything happens. Large documents (being more than just a few pages) are practically impossible to scroll in when opened in Safari. Here I experience several seconds of delay on practically any action. As I read a lot of scientific articles online as part of my daily work, this is a big issue that directly effects my productivity. It is practically impossible to work with PDF documents within Safari, so every time I need to read something, I have to download the PDF and open it with something else.

To be clear this is not even lag I am talking about, but actual freezing delay times of several seconds! These are simple tasks, that any other machine handles perfectly, but 3k flagship like this is unable to do it. Hm?

Is this also a well known issue for the rest of you guys?

Excactly the same with me.

I can run top end games like Formula 1 2012 at FULL resolution and graphics specs and it runs buttery smooth, even on battery power, but like you have highlighted, simple tasks such as calendar scroll and pdf viewing are almost un-usable.

No effect for me either. I just wonder what to. This is my second retina (replaced the first one in hope of a better computer) and I still have several days to return it. If everything worked buttery smooth this would be one **** of computer, but as we know it doesn't. On top of that I have just noticed that on the top of my screen the brightness of one small area in lower than the rest and become apparent when viewing bring content, perhaps the most of the white login screen. Switch to normal MBP or wait for a next rMBP generation - I honestly don't know :/

I've got used to the preformance of the machine now.

When I look at a normal MBP, the screen quality looks so inferior and they're so chunky. BUT everything does run amaingly smoothly.

I love the retina screen too much to swap back.

That's very true. I thought the old ones were very slim before I got the retina one and now they look soo bulky. I think this whole case is a good example of the fact that user experience matters more than hardware. At least for me.

I have the same poor performance in PDF's - and expirenced the same "many pictures" in Safari, Mail, Expose, etc. as well. I don't think it's a HW issue, but "just" a graphice driver problem. And there must be a thousand of apple employees with this machine who also have this problem....

But I can't explain why this is not solved yet....

PS. The quarts debug is of no help, neither total reinstall, turn off deep sleep, and all other "tricks" - it's the graphics driver for retina!

Related to the lag while viewing pdf in safari, I was experiencing the same issue on my "regular" MBP (late 2011) : the scrolling is very laggy and the cursor moves are sluggish.

To manage this I installed a month ago this software :

     http://smoothmouse.com

     Then you have to enable it in the dedicated preference pane.

Since I haven't been experiencing any lag while browsing pdf in safari or in mail.

This hasn't solved the "animation" lag in mission control or in the launchpad but I can at least use safari and mail...

This may work also for rMBP.

PS :  for those using BetterTouchTool, you now have to set the mouse speed in the smoothmouse preference pane and choose acceleration "as in Windows", this is a current bug of SmoothMouse, but I expect it will be fixed faster than apple devellopers are fixing OS X...

Regards

Nice suggestion, but hasn't made any difference on my rMBP.

As I told before, the lag appeared after I installed Xcode, 3 days ago. It was impossible to use Safari.

I did the Quartz Debug trick now and the lag is gone. I had to disable HiDPI (Quartz Debug -> Window -> UI Resolution) and log out, but for my surprise the lag didn't come back when I re-enabled HiDPI.

The difference is huge, this is absolutely no coincidence.

Does anyone have something to say about this?