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

It's a shame that every UI lag / Safari glitch phone call results in being sent to the Apple Store, which is then followed by a genius saying they do not see the problem. Apple, I have a solution... release a video driver for Windows 7 that allows me to switch between discrete and embedded graphics so that I can switch to a superior OS (yes, I said it: as of this moment, Windows 7 yields a better experience for simple tasks like surfing the internet).

Im with Cemy, i was EXTREEEEMELY dissappointed when i fianlly got my rMBP (first shipment took a month, longest month ever!) with all of the graphics problems, then my LG screen dying. Apple have definitely started to restore some of my confidence in this decision, lets just hope that in a little more time they will be able to make it perfect. the only problem i see now is the terrible wake times, my 2007 MBP with a completely packed HDD and alot of programs running wakes up faster than my rMBP, very dissappointing.

Also on a side note, do any gamers on these things experience REALLY hot graphics cards while playing, skyrim etc, just through a wrapper.  like mine gets close to 90degrees celcius (GPU and GPU diode temps). also is that heatlth for the machine to be running that hot

Regards

When you say "in a wrapper" do you mean running windows in Parallels to play skyrim?  Just curious what a wrapper is exactly.  All notebooks are going to run hot like that when you play games or run high res video, do video encoding, etc. It's pretty normal for the GPU to reach temps like that, especially in a tightly packed notebook.  Although no heat is really healthy for a chip.

I have a trick for keeping temps down when I would encode video (Not so great for gaming due to instability)  I would take one of those blue hospital gel-packs that people use to reduce swelling, (A big one) from my freezer, put it on my desk, put a thin towel over it and put my laptop down, being careful not to block the fan slots.  The aluminum of the case has strong thermal transfer properties so the whole case would get really cold and bring down all my temps by about 20 degrees Celsius or more.  You have to be careful with this because these gel-packs can "sweat" or have a tiny bit of frost on them that melts, and electronics and moisture don't mix.  But it would work really well for about an hour, and then I would pull out the pack and it would be really warm!  2 main benefits to this are reduced temps, and your fans come way down in RPM... like sub 1500, so you won't even hear them never-mind have them spooling up so fast it sounds like the there is a jet in the room.  Also it's healthier for the chips to be at lower temps throughout their life.  Use at your own risk though.

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that after repairing disk permissions and "forcing" beam sync in quartz debug, I have more reasonable user experience. Mission Control is smooth as it should be, but "show application windows" is still a little laggy.

I don't even know what "beam sync" is. I was desperately trying to find a solution to UI lag issue on my 2.3 8gb rMBP.

I want to add that its better now with both integrated and discrete graphics.

I hope Apple somehow fix this

Please everyone test your rMBP on this website,

http://www.hardcandycases.com/

this website gives me the most lag which is extremely annoying, a computer this expensive shouldn't have these type of problems!!!

Plese test with that website and tell me if it lags on your rMBP

My config is

2.33 15" with 256 gb ssd and 8gb ddr 1600mhz

HardCandycases.com is not exactly buttersmooth, but certainly not a very laggy website on my machine (2.6 15" with 512 GB SSD and 16 GB ram, tested ). Tested with both the Intel HD 4000 and the Geforce 650M. The homepage of Arstechnica.com is much worse.

It may be interesting to read the analysis of AnandTech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6409/13inch-retina-macbook-pro-review/5

They essentially suggest that the UI lag is caused by a combination of a suboptimal software implementation for the hidpi retina modes, and processor bottlenecks.

This seems to make sense, and aligns with my own findings:

• no lag when using the lowdpi 2880 x 1800 resolution -- while this is exactly the same amount of pixels to process as the hidpi 1440x900 resolution
• no lag when using Windows 7/8 in native resolution
• very few differences between the performance of the HD4000 and GT650M in desktop applications
• significant improvements in beta builds of Webkit (new versions of Safari).

It therefore seems that Apple should be able to resolve this with a software update. Or maybe that's wishful thinking?

Kevin808

By wrapper i mean wineskin or cider, programs used for porting windows games for mac. i have also tried parallels which did reduce the temp slightly, by a few degrees, but couldnt comprehend having 30gb of my 256gb hdd taken up just for one game, hence why i use a wrapper like wineskin (http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php)

also thanks for the tip on the cooling, i will give it a go and see what resutls i get.

The Music Prodigy, that website is a little laggy but no enough for it to be unbareable

regards

Thanks for the info, I did not realize there was such a thing, I'll have to check it out. 

K-

This website is runs very smooth for me.. i can make a video showing that if you want (obviously)

actually guys I just switched from Crome to Safari and the lag is gone , don't know if it was only chrome or if it's because I tried the Disk Permission Repair ... anyways my laptop is running like a champ now

Hi,

How do you run Disk Permission Repair ?

are you able to provide us a step by step instructions on how to do it?

Already tried the disk permissions - didnt do anything for the UI slowdown on my computer.. although it did fix the constant crashing issues safari and itunes were having, but that was unrelated to lag.

Tigerwong, try google'ing "how to do disk permissions on mac osx" - there are a lot of tutorials on how to do that out there - its quite simple.

Also, since even new retina MBP's are having UI lags out of the box for Safari and the whole system, it doesnt make sense that repairing disk permissions would have any affect on the lag; just my take from experience.

I've also experienced this problem. What could it be? Hardware? Software? Please help me.

/A guy who don't know where to go..

Have you tried disabling photo stream in system preferences > iCloud ?

I know that this caused huge lag issues with every pc on my network as it was throttling the entire network, and I was getting a lot of OS lag too - beachballed for everything; switched photo stream off and back to full speed ahead with everything, so potentially worth a shot?