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

My MBPR 15" started to have gigantic UI lag after the 10.8.3 + SMC 1.1 update. In mission control, when moving a window, the window movement was 5 seconds behind the mouse pointer, I was able to see the menu bar redrawing when switching desktop, ... It was even worst with the NVIDIA GPU compared to the HD 4000. I did many SMC reset, NVRAM reset, and I reinstalled the system and none of this fix the problem. I was really ****** off to have this kind of performance with a top of the line laptop.

I was almost giving up when I found a solution by chance:

• Downolad "Graphics Tools for Xcode - January 2013" (you probably need to have a developper account) from "https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action"
• Launch "Quartz Debug"

Maybe the following steps are useless, but it's what I did

• Tools -> Show Traking Rectangles
• Window -> FrameMeter
• I played a bit with the UI, switching desktop, moving windows, ...
• Quit Quartz Debug

All the problems gone, no more UI lags :-)))

I don't know how you found that, but it really works! i had the exact same issue. took me a while to find this answer, i hope other people having lag issues after 10.8.3 and EFI 1.1 can find this, it's not an easy fix to find by yourself. anyway, thanks!

Didn't work for me, but it is interesting to see that scrolling inside mail in 1680 res averages about 12-15 frames per second.

That helped quite a bit for me. Added like 10 fps to the animations, like the expose function of all open windows on current desktop. Nice.

Also, if I have a flash video running, it goes back to the old laggy behaviour.

It does go away after a while, though I can not find a pattern yet.    

I think it's a dead end. I bet that playing around with the mission control interface and windows merely caches those objects and actions and thus a short-term percieved increase in performance.

-G

it's definitely not short-term improvement for me. the integrated gpu was working fine, but when it switched to the discrete GPU the dock would stutter and tear (as if v-sync was not working) and i saw almost no animation from mission control. It was not a FPS bump, it made it work again, even after reboot.

It was working for me, but as soon as I ran something in flash it lags again

I stand corrected. I ran Quartz Debug while in YouTube and YouTube now screams at 85 fps!!! Woah....Okay maybe we're onto something here...I will continue to test for the next couple of hours here. I'll keep you posted.

Here's a link to my screenshot running Quartz Debug and YouTube in Safari.

http://members.shaw.ca/wchinonline/Wayne_Screenshot.png

Let me know what you think.

Interesting that when I turn ON "Autoflush drawing" whole my screen start blinking

The “Autoflush drawing” checkbox causes the window server to flush the contents of a Core Graphics graphics context after each drawing operation, thus "blipping" at every frame rate. But it's happening so fast it appears as blinking. Turn it off and you'll notice the graphics become very smooth.

Brilliant! As soon as Quartz Debug is started, every UI lag and other issues disappear.

This is the very first step in the direction of the definitive solution. Thank you emath! +1 for you!

Now my rMBP (15" - 2.7 GHz - 16 GB - 512 GB) runs and screams like day one!

And just launching Quartz Debug.

Best regards!

UNIVERSAL BINARIES!! I've downloaded a slew of apps that have been compiled with Universal Binaries and NONE OF THEM SHOW LAG!! They are screaming fast and refresh rates are in the high 90's!! So far I've downloaded MacTubes, ArchiCAD 16, Gimp for Mac and several others.  Here's a list of apps that have been compiled with Universal Binaries. Download a few freebies below and see if any of those show lag.

http://guides.macrumors.com/List_of_Universal_Binaries

I did the Quartz thing and noticed considerable lag scrolling on facebook using Safari.

Also, it's almost imposible to use facebook or write an email on gmail if you start a Google Hangout (http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/) - you don't need to add anyone to the hangout, just start it - but I don't know if in this case I'm asking too much for this machine. Could anyone test this in a machine without the problem? If it doesn't lag on other machines this would be a perfect case, it's sooo lagged.

UPDATE

Just launched Quartz Debug and then closed it. No option touched, nothing.

The system now works just perfectly in ANY environment, with all the apps.

Perfect Safary in any site, with any content. Fast scolling between workspaces.

I've rebooted also, never launched Quartz Debug again, and everything is just fine.

FOR ME ITS SOLVED!