Macbook Pro with Retina, Mountain Lion graphic jitters

Your solution worked for me! This rMBP UI lag was driving me crazy! Thanks bud!

My retina MacBook Pro has had terrible graphics performance problems for a couple of weeks. I searched all over various forums and tried everything: resetting SCM, manually selecting discrete/integrated graphics card, deleting graphics kexts, etc. Nothing helped until I found this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4391500

Now my rMBP has silky smooth graphics again!

The directions in that post are a little hard to understand so I cleaned them up here:

Step 1: Delete system windowserver preferences

1. In the Finder, from the menu bar, select "Go -> Go to Folder..."
2. Enter: /Library/Preferences/
3. Delete the file called com.apple.windowserver.plist

Step 2: Delete user windowserver preferences

1. In the Finder, from the menu bar, select "Go -> Go to Folder..."
2. Enter: ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/
3. Delete all files that start with com.apple.windowserver (On my rMBP, there was one file called com.apple.windowserver.12AFB147-95D6-5C70-8F62-C1E4F2BE81BE)

Step 3: Reset the PRAM

(These instructions are from http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379)

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

Hopefully this helps others with bad graphics performance on retina MacBook Pros.

For anyone that wants to check out the problematic plists from my rMBP, here are the files:

http://jherrman.com/slow-rmbp-2012/com.apple.windowserver.plist

http://jherrman.com/slow-rmbp-2012/com.apple.windowserver.12AFB147-95D6-5C70-8F6 2-C1E4F2BE81BE.plist

Jeremy Herrman

Did nothing in my case, UI still stutters a lot, no matter if it's Integrated Only, Discrete Only or Dynamic Switching.

It's JANUARY and we still have this problem with OS X 10.8.2.

This is my first Mac and I bought it because I thought Apple had respect for its consumers, that it would be different from other computers, that I wouldn't waste my time struggling in forums to find a solution.

8 virtual cores, 8GB RAM, GeForce 650M and I can't read my gmail.... "best mac ever made"...

it is sadly, very very sadlly...

and the most interesting that I gave promise to my self that if 10.8.3 won't solve my problems i will sell my macbook... and it might happen that 10.8.3 never will come out .. what should I do ?? 🙂 they stole our money, they stole most important our time, and they lost us as customers. Good luck Apple!

P.S. another interesting point, why so small amount of people claim about that ? why "burn in display" topic has 200K views and our only ~8K ? come on guys, you don't have such problem ? or who bought so many rMBP ?

Many encountered a similar problem when Snow Leopard was released and Apple was doing nothing to fix it. In the end I took a screencast of the problem, put it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haaxsIiXSIU) and emailed the link to the late Steve Jobs (managed to find out his email address via another Apple forum). The next day I got a call from an Apple Engineer who remotely connected to my Mac to investigate the problem. He confirmed the problem was software related and a fix was issued as part of the Snow Leopard 10.6.4 update (and I received an Apple Store gift card).

Everyone on this thread needs to take a quick screencast of this problem and put it on YouTube.

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 grudgnor! Your solution of deleting the windowserver settings worked. I did not reset the PRAM. I just deleted the files and rebooted. It has been fine since then including several reboots. This is unbelieveable. Apple really is getting sloppy these days. 😟

Mike

grudgnor wrote:

My retina MacBook Pro has had terrible graphics performance problems for a couple of weeks. I searched all over various forums and tried everything: resetting SCM, manually selecting discrete/integrated graphics card, deleting graphics kexts, etc. Nothing helped until I found this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4391500

Now my rMBP has silky smooth graphics again!

The directions in that post are a little hard to understand so I cleaned them up here:

Step 1: Delete system windowserver preferences

1. In the Finder, from the menu bar, select "Go -> Go to Folder..."
2. Enter: /Library/Preferences/
3. Delete the file called com.apple.windowserver.plist

Step 2: Delete user windowserver preferences

1. In the Finder, from the menu bar, select "Go -> Go to Folder..."
2. Enter: ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/
3. Delete all files that start with com.apple.windowserver (On my rMBP, there was one file called com.apple.windowserver.12AFB147-95D6-5C70-8F62-C1E4F2BE81BE)

Step 3: Reset the PRAM

(These instructions are from http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379)

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.

Hopefully this helps others with bad graphics performance on retina MacBook Pros.

For anyone that wants to check out the problematic plists from my rMBP, here are the files:

http://jherrman.com/slow-rmbp-2012/com.apple.windowserver.plist

http://jherrman.com/slow-rmbp-2012/com.apple.windowserver.12AFB147-95D6-5C70-8F6 2-C1E4F2BE81BE.plist

Jeremy Herrman

Thanks a lot!!!

It really worked perfectly for me...

have a macbook pro 8,2 with the jitters only when I was on dedicated GPU.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4157768?answerId=20357413022#20357413022

this totally fixed it for me!

Thanks !

cmon apple get your sh-it together.

still believe in you guys!

Like others, grudgnor's solution fixed not only my stuttering Flash video on my MBPr with OSX 10.8, but also a number of other glitches due to clearing the memory. Thanks!

Hi,

I found the same problems time ago and, after following the steps, the problem was solved but... unfortunadtely it appears again on expose!

This time I tried to reset the PRAM but, after doing, jitters and bad transitions appears again at Dock and remains at Expose!

Any idea? This is really, really, really upseting for a 2600 € machine.

Macbook Pro Retina 15", 16Gb RAM, 2.3 GHz Core i7, OS X 10.8.3

Thanks

Just to really cement things here.

I had this problem appear on my new iMac about 2 weeks ago as this was a replacement machine for my previous one apple collected it and sent it for repair. A new logic board and a new LCD was fitted and guess what. Still had the stuttering problem however your fix minus the PRAM reset fixed it completely. My stuttering only started after i updated to 10.8.3.

27Inch - iMac - 3.4GHz - 8GB - 1TB - 10.8.3 (12D78)

worked for me thank you so much!

Woho! This solved my problem to. I skipped part 2) because I did not have that file. Did this under 10.8.4. The file in step 1) was created on June 28. Strange... No UI lag so far!

Original solution was found here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4391500?answerId=22548555022#22548555022