GUI performace

B

boz

Registered
Hi,

I've been playing with OS X for some time now and I am not impressed.
Aqua is too slow to allow any productivity, it takes to long starting apps, resizing a window is just ridiculous, file system navigation is slow and complicated, the dock is a bad replacement for apple menu and applications menu.
Takeing everything into consideration: Aqua is it not maclike; some X-Window managers do a much better job. And please don't remind me that its still beta, I've worked with a lot of beta versions of the MacOS, starting at system 8.1 and they maybe were kind of slower but not like this...

boz
Tested on power mac g4 agp 400Mhz, 512MB of ram

PS: The terminal is great though.
 
I think that the GUI is really slow. Resizing windows is a complete pain, and sometimes application launches are ridiculously long.

Personally, your remark about previous betas such as 8.1 weren't so slow isn't a good argument. I have been using betas before too, and they weren't NEARLY as slow. There is one big difference between OSX PB nd 8.1. That is that the graphics display system is completely new in OSX. In 8.1 the graphics system was already layed down, the finder had existed for years, and a lot of code had been perfected. OS X is a completely different story. I hope that this is fixed by the release, but even if it's not it won't surprise me. OS X is not going to become the "Operating System of the Gods" overnight. It will take a couple releases to become better.

One thing that could also be a problem with some of the graphics related things is that ATI cards seem to be kind of slow. The built-in graphics of my 7500 can just about equal the performance of the RAGE 128 in my G3. And this is a big surprise since the 7500 is 5 or 6 years old.

I hope that Apple fixes these speed problems and soon! Even if they don't accelerate all the currently slow functions i would be happy. I would rather have an OS X with slow features than no features. I think the big ones apple needs to fix are Application Launches, Window Resize. Those are the only two that really bother me.
 
Originally posted by mtc7501
I would rather have an OS X with slow features than no features. I think the big ones apple needs to fix are Application Launches, Window Resize.
Click to expand...

See, I'm just the opposite. I would rather them leave out or make optional those "features" until they are as fast or faster than the current OS. Unless somthing miraculous happens and live window resizing works perfectly when OS X is released, it should definitely be an option (which would possibly appeal greatly to those on earlier hardware).

I agree that application launching feels slow, even with integral apps like Terminal. Why *is* that?
 
Originally posted by mtc7501
That is that the graphics display system is completely new in OSX. In 8.1 the graphics system was already layed down, the finder had existed for years, and a lot of code had been perfected. OS X is a completely different story. I hope that this is fixed by the release, but even if it's not it won't surprise me. OS X is not going to become the "Operating System of the Gods" overnight. It will take a couple releases to become better.
Click to expand...

I am not sure if that will happen. Older systems were definately faster than e.g. OS 9 is today. I am afraid that my 6 months old hardware is already outdated! I am also not sure if the gui makes use of hardware acceleration and if better graphics hardware will bring a major speedup.
OS X seems to be meant for next generation PowerMacs & Books.

BoZ
 
The PB, most likely, does not have general optimizations turned on, extra debug code and validation logic in place, and video acceleration not supported.

Geesh - give it a break.
 
Im sick and tired of people saying thats its slow. Of course its slow, it hasn't been omptimized yet. NO one ever said this is a replacement for OS 9 yet. Boz, maybe you've had lots of experience with other Mac OS betas but dont forget this is completely new, never been done before. Just wait and see....... OS X will blow everything out of the water and then some. Even windows 2000 has the option to turn off live window resizing. This time Apple is listening. They cant afford not to.
 
Im sick and tired of people saying thats its slow. Of course its slow, it hasn't been omptimized yet. NO one ever said this is a replacement for OS 9 yet. Boz, maybe you've had lots of experience with other Mac OS betas but dont forget this is completely new, never been done before. Just wait and see....... OS X will blow everything out of the water and then some. Even windows 2000 has the option to turn off live window resizing. This time Apple is listening. They cant afford not to.
 
I agree with the above two posts that this discussion may be moot, because of debug code, etc.

For me, live window resizing doesn't seem to be all that slow. It doesn't look quite right because something happens to the scroll bars, but it works fast enough.

The bigger problem is application launching. For example, just now it took 12 seconds for Find to open and it was still shuffling memory. Needless to say, I never use Find any more (yes, I could launch it at startup, but my startup items seem to be deleted every time I log in, something to do with using auto-login instead of logging in manually). I also think that Sherlock looks terrible and it is so annoying to have to be always dragging those panes around that I would avoid using it anyway.
 
I believe that has to do with the current RAM requirements. Apple says it will reduce requirements down to 64MB upon release (elimination of debug code and etc.)

I was running X under 64MB of RAM and, yes, launching apps took forever because of paging memory to and from disk. I just upped the RAM to the recommended 128MB and app launch time has been reduced. Of course this depends how many other apps are running.
 
i have 512MB RAM and app launching is still too slow for me; of course for something like Sherlock, anything other than 'instantly' is too slow :)
 
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