Mission Control performance on 5K Retina iMac

Question

Mission Control performance on 5K Retina iMac

Hello,

I just bought a 5K Retina iMac, everything maxed out, including graphics card (AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB).

Loving the retina resolution and overall the machine is very sweet, HOWEVER, there's one thing that really bothers me.

With just a handful of windows (10-15) on the screen (from different apps), Mission Control animation becomes REALLY choppy. Like really, I'm getting 2-3fps - basically a slide show.

Checking the video memory usage (iStat menus), I see more than 90% of video RAM is used (and actually, that much is used after a fresh restart as well).

Looks like the amount of video RAM (EVEN maxed out option) is not enough for smooth operation of Mission Control.

Wonder if anyone else having this issue, and also… wonder if there's any possibility of this being fixed in software? (I would assume we could basically give up on the fix, but hey… there's always hope, right?)

I've heard early Retina MacBooks 13" had this issue… Was it ever fixed?…

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X Yosemite (10.10), 4 GHz i7, 32GB, AMD Radeon R9 M295X

Posted on Oct 26, 2014 4:36 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

pythogorian

Level 1

5 points

Oct 29, 2014 4:21 PM in response to Mike Kornienko

I have the Retina MacBooks 13" late 2013 and they still haven't fixed it. I was waiting for Yosemite and hoping they will fix it but got disappointed as it is even worse in Yosemite. Switched back to Mavericks. The bug is still there but it's a bit more useable (more FPS on animations - still not enough though).

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Answer 2

Nov 2, 2014 5:28 PM in response to Mike Kornienko

Thanks for the reply!

Looks like a hope for getting this stuff resolved in software is not getting brighter…

I'm not even quite sure it is video RAM after all… could very well be the lack of GPU power.

I wonder how it works for people who are on retina iMacs with stock video cards (the ones with 2GB of video RAM)?

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Answer 3

Nov 17, 2014 8:08 PM in response to Mike Kornienko

Just a quick update… With the 10.10.1 update today, it looks like Apple did something to fix performance and improve performance from "are you kidding me?!" to "oh well… considering the gorgeous screen, I can live with that, I guess" level 🙂

Good job overall! Pretty impressed with the responsiveness for far. Still not really butter-silky-smooth as was my fully specced Late 2013 non-retina iMac, but as said above, quite bearable.

Anyone else noticing these improvements?

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Answer 4

luisgerh

Level 1

0 points

Dec 28, 2014 12:48 PM in response to Mike Kornienko

I own the iMac 5K with the 2GB graphics card and am experiencing major UI performance problems like many other people, Apple seems to know about the issue and some guy said they told him there will be a fix (main thread here: iMac 5K Retina extremely slow Mission Control). I also used iStats Menus to monitor my GPU RAM usage an it was almost empty all the time (max 10%). It may be a issue with iStats Menus but I don't think so, it also varied a little when doing graphic intensive tasks. Maybe this is the reason for the performance problems that are discussed in in the other thread. I checked the GPU RAM usage on my old 2011 21.5" iMac with 1GB and a few seconds after startup it was nearly completely full, I never had any graphic performance problems with that iMac, everything is super smooth.

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Answer 5

Dec 28, 2014 1:17 PM in response to Mike Kornienko

I have the Retina iMac from the day it came out with the default video card. Like many have mentioned after running for a few hours the machines slows to a crawl in terms of UI. Even typing will have a major lag and the machine becomes unusable, restarting fixes it for a while.

I became super frustrated and installed the 10.10.2 (14C81h) Beta and I can confirm the problem is fixed for the most part. It still isn't SUPER smooth when using mission control but the major lag is gone.

It seemed from the start it was some sort of memory leak or software bug so I am glad it will be fixed soonish.

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