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

I would also suggest istat pro for dashboard to monitor your various temperatures, remember apple say use the rMBP on a cold desk with good thermal conductivity not on your lap.

(although it wouls be nice to get some decend drivers to resolve this issue in ML, pretty sure the fans need to run louder which is the problem for voice recognition)

The most terrible situation, that I asked my friend buy rmbp to mr when he was in NY. But I'm living outside of USA. In my coubtry there is official seller, but I don't believe that they will return money to me ;((( I'm really to disappointed. I will wait 10.8.2 and if it won't solve my problem I will try to talk wih apple.

Anyone else can confirm such issue (the link on previous page)

Its so easy, please try and let me know please. Thanks.

This is definitely not a heat related issue. I have stuttering issues when the computer is freshly booted in a 60 degree F room and registers a very low temp on istat. Instead, I think it has to do with what is loaded. When I hit F3 on the blank desktop, the animation is usually very smooth. When I scroll over to a fullscreen Safari, Mail, or iTunes and hit F3, I get just a couple frames of animation (or even just 1 frame).

Today I have been in a shop that had a Retina model for testing, but it was limited in applications that customers could not try many apps on it. However, I managed to get a list of text so that it looks like a word processing application because I wanted to see how much of long text the Retina can take (whether it's OK for software development or not). Honestly, it looked like the retina cannot handle long text at all, at least when it is not in Safari. It falls down to scrolling at sub 20 frames I guess (in the editor). Working hours a day with that machine would cause constant headache, at least for me. Other applications, besides iCal and Mail, worked very very smooth, no lags at all (Mountain Lion), not like on Lion back then.

My personal guess is that the CPU is completely overloaded with all the work to do for animations. Too many pixels to move in a too short period of time (not every animation is handled by the GPU). It looks like most applications draw their animations themselves, rather than using a software framework that supports GPU animations (something comparable to OpenGL). OS-supported animations seem to be very smooth all the time, like when a confirmation dialog pops up or something like that. But not those apps that draw their animations themselves. Therefore I would guess these issues can appear more often when the CPU is hot and gets throttled. But stuttering is also present when the machine is not hot, it's just much less noticeable.

Same here. I was at an electronics store last weekend where they had the rMBP on display. Played with it a little, on the mail app, safari and a few others, was surprised how much it lagged and stuttered compared to my old 2011 MBP. Quite surprised at the poor performance.

Today i was running different benchmarks ... based from that article

http://www.slashgear.com/macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review-mid-2012-1323382 6/

and compared it with mine tests

my result is http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1015569

all others are greater a bit than in article.

If hardware works well, then I'm hoping that this is software problems, but one thing which is non clear to me: who and when will fix it ?

Add me to the list of very disappointed new Macbook Pro Retina owners.  I rely heavily on mission control and the stuttering/lag/delay is ruining my experience... so much that I'm considering going back to my old MBA which operated flawlessly when compared to this supposedly much more powerful machine.   

Amen to that pj737. Beautiful high resolution display marred by horrible UI visual performance. I'm installing Windows 7 via Boot Camp until this is resolved. It's literally embarrassing to have this $2400 laptop that runs worse than my wife's 2009 Macbook Pro. I will not be buying another Apple product again if they don't resolve this.

You can try oprn Mail.app with a thread 4-5 messages and try tun QuickTime and click record from screen, when you will start recording try to scroll these letters:) funny effect nothing scrolling even totally... I don't understand why they still keep silent ?

I know it may be not very welcome to say that, but this has always been apples centric idea of designing products. I can remember steve jobs once said something like : It's wrong to go with the hardware, to sit down with the engineers and then look what you can get out of it. It is better to begin with user experience and then come up with the hardware over time ... so here you go. Skipping the first generation of apples innovative products seems to be appropriate if you plan to invest much money.

Return it if you don't like it, if you still can. I know you just hope for a fix, but to be honest, as I see it, there is not much space for lots of improvements. There probably will be some minor fixes to that, but they won't get rid of performance problems with this model completely. Just my personal opinion on that.

Someone says that UI lag it is because GPU is too slow, what if I wil connect external monitor with lower ppi ? and lags will be still there ? is it means that it's not GPU problem ?

I had the same problem, i've used mountain lion for a while, since it came out and about a week the ui started to run laggy, i checked with activity monitor and istat pro, but neither the cpu nor the video memory seemed to be running abnormally, i tried repairing disk with disk utility and uninstalling recent software, i finally figured that the issue might have been caused when i adjusted the economy parameters on sistem preferences so i restored them to the original stats and the problem was automatically fixed even without restarting my mac, i'm on a early 2011 15'' MacBook Pro, with 8 GB of ram.

Fantastic I had connect external TV (using HDMI) and lags almost disappear, i would say GUI become smoother. And most interesting fact that even on laptop gui become smoother. When i disconnect ext. TV everything become as previously. Terrible... I don't understand can I return it to Apple to fix such problem ? Have I rights for that ot not ?

The lag seems to be reduced, no matter what graphic card you use, if you change your stacks in the dock to folders. It helped me a lot, the UI lag is almost gone now! It's definitely a software problem. Try it, and let me now if it helps.

Adding my voice to the chorus here: rMBP 2.3GHz/16GB RAM/256GB SSD, mission control is horribly laggy when any more than two or three applications or desktops. Scrolling in Safari and iTunes also very noticably laggy. Really disappointing. Lion did not have this problem.