Mac Mini :: Video Performance Highly Disappointing
Apr 21, 2009
After reading some of the threads here with people being very happy with their minis, I decided to head down to the Apple store and give it a go. I used each of the computers (a Mac mini, Mac Pro, and iMac) for about 10 minutes (which seems like forever when you are in a crowded retail store) doing things I would normally be doing at home. The iMac was fine, as expected. It handled just about everything with satisfactory speed, even thought it was the base 24" model with no fancy processors or graphics.
Video
The Mac Mini though was quite disappointing. To render a 1 minute video in iMovie it took around 4 minutes. The Mac Pro did the job on the same exact movie (sample file found on every display computer) in about 45 seconds. Another big difference was apparent, while the movies were rendering, the Mac Pro was completely responsive and I was able to load iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, Safari, and iTunes. Each opened up within seconds, and each interface was running smoothly as if nothing was happening in the background (granted for a short period as the movie finished rendering quickly).............
I have a 15" 2010 MBP. I got it well spec'd, with 7200 drive, 8 GB ram, best CPU... First thing I did was bootcamp. Went smoothly - did a 400 gb partition for Windows 7. The drivers all installed fine and Windows 7 does alright.
My Windows Experience scores: Processor: 6.9 RAM: 6.9 Graphic: 6.4 Gaming graphics: 6.4 Hard drive: 5.9
Things look good... But I am having trouble playing hidef content - VLC is choppy on a bunch of files that play smooth as silk when booted into Mac OS - and actually even play ok on my old Santa Rosa 15" MBP. Quicktime is also slow. I have always found VLC to be very solid. (actually use it on the Mac side for this test as well). I tried playing with the hardware acceleration toggle, and it does seem better with it disabled - anyone else having issues playing hidef media on the windows side of this MBP?
I just got a brand new Mac Mini 2,26 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2 gig RAM, and it's hooked up to my tv with a mini-DVI adapter. Snow Leopard installed. I noticed right away that the screen looks really sluggish, with screen tearing and laggy video performance. Playing videos in Plex for instance there is a lot of screen tear and I had to set the display to 720p to get it decent, and even then it's rough, even on SD videos! So I ran Xbench, and got a remarkable slow score on OpenGL; 43. My MacBook Pro running with the 9400M card got 97.
I need some advice on whether a hardware update will actually improve my video performance or not. Currently I am using a mac mini snow leopard server 2009 model hooked via mini display port to hdmi adapter to my lg 37 LED LCD TV. The mac mini has a intel x25 m 80 gb bootdrive. 2 external fw 800 drives used as video storage. Mostly I use boxee eyetv sat all controlled via appleremote - sofacontrol.
Altogether a great setup. With big mkv files in full hd the picture sometimes is choppy. Would a upgrade to the new 2010 mac mini server with direct hdmi port and 320M graphics actually improve the video quality - graphics performance? or should I stick to my current setup? (I bought the current server cheap from the uk)
My PowerMac plays most small videos (640p) on YouTube just fine, as well it does an OK job at playing slightly larger videos in Quicktime. I would like to not have to worry about Flash any more. With the new 10.1 beta 2 I notice a nice boost in performance, almost tolerable. If I install a graphics card that supports Core Video will it free up the CPU? How can I tell if a card supports Core Video? As well, what cards do you recommend? Is it difficult to flash a graphics card to work with OS X Tiger in a PowerMac G4?
I'm having what I'd consider poor performance on the new 2ghz Mini in XP.I get non-responsiveness when moving large files across the network and it just is slow overall.Its slower than my previous 1.8ghz Mini.
The standard MS drivers for the SATA controller are installed even though I ran the Bootcamp install, does anyone else show the Nvidia SATA controller driver installed? That is usually the biggest cause on non-Intel chipsets, the default MS driver for the SATA controller...I was just going to install Forceware and see what happens but wondered what other people show in Device Manager.I get a lack of response from Remote Desktop, and after several hours of high network traffic it just stops responding to the network period.OSx I'm not sure about because I rarely use it but I did boot it up to do some surfing in Safari and found its response time to be slow.
My Mac Pro (MacPro1,1) sticks to a EFI 32 bit so that I can't use the Snow Leopard 64 bit kernel. I know that 64 applications can run (and actually do run) on top of the 32 bit kernel but I can't stand that Mac Book Pro owners are able to run the shiny new kernel while I don't.
After some difficulty upgrading my 4HD RAID0 2.66 MP to SL I've discovered my full screen Hulu and WB browser video is choppy if I use a full screen pop out window. If i go full screen it works fine. I've checked my Internet speed and it is as good as ever. I have not changed my config. of three LCD screens or any other hardware. This problem happens in both Safari and Firefox. I did have to reset the PRAM in order for the SL installer to see my RAID0 HD per Applecare. The bottom line is I used to be able to watch Hulu via a pop up expanded to the edges of my 24# LCD, and surf using one of my 22 inch screens. Now I can't unless I want the video and audio dialog to sych. I did confirm the the main Radeon 3870 card is still running at 16X. Could this be driver problems?
I currently got the 5870 driving a 30" ACD and 23" ACD. Would there be any noticeable performance increase if I were get the gt120 to run the 23" and have 5870 run the 30" ACD (my work display)?
In Snow Leopard Quickeys hangs at intervals and Spell Catcher only works on and off. My AES decryption software which was in services is no longer there and I can see no way of putting it back. This is a very disappointing. I have gone back to Leopard
I just got my air today and everything is fine, but some standard def quicktime files (.mov) that played fine on my mac pro and windows netbook, for some reason play like a slideshow on the 11" air. They play perfectly in VLC however, anyone know why? I would not care but there for a school project... They are rather large for their quality (600mb for 3 min) they were exported from avid...
this is kind of a dumb question. I have a Radeon 8500 in a Power Mac G4 that I'm repairing. I have a PCI Radeon 7000, and I was wondering, if I put it in too, would having two GPUs affect performance even though the monitor was only attached to the 8500?
i am using Mainly Photoshop, RealFlow and Maya on my latest MAC:
Model Identifier:MacPro3,1 Processor Name:Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor Speed:3 GHz Number Of Processors:2 Total Number Of Cores:8 L2 Cache (per processor):12 MB Memory:4 GB Bus Speed:1.6 GHz Video1: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT: Video2: VIDIA GeForce 8800 GT:
If i order 2 More Video Cards, will that improve performance, even i have only 2 Displays connected?
Today I just bought and installed an (Apple) ATI 4870 for my '06 Mac Pro. It's all gone pretty smoothly, however I have noticed that flash video playback from sites such as Youtube and Vimeo are jerky. Have I missed something about installing a 4870 into an older MP? I thought it was basically plug and play - even though it's not officially supported by Apple. Quicktime movies are nice and smooth. This is under Snow Leopard, so I'm not sure if the problem exists under Leopard but I could probably move my last bootable backup drive into an enclosure with firewire and check things out.
I recently purchased a new 2.8 GHz iMac. I know that AVCHD is highly processor intensive but surely I should be able to play back Full HD video on a brand new computer! Using Toast Titanium 9 to play the files I'm getting ~20 fps on a 30 fps stream! Editing is not an issue because Final Cut/Apple Intermediate Codec take care of playback but I want to be able to archive the unedited AVCHD and that means I need to be able to view the raw files later. My CPU averages ~25% idle while playing back the video. Does that mean the video card is the bottleneck?
Is there any way to improve the video performance on my iBook G3 (600mhz, 640MB RAM, 16MB VRAM)? I find that besides not being able to play any of the HD trailers at Apple's website (even 480p), it can't even seem to play a standard trailer without stutterring. Is there anything I can do to improve the video performance?
I recently upgraded my 1st Gen MBP 2.14Ghz and my legs no longer get cooked while doing basic task. This is a great improvement.My new laptop is the 2.53Ghz w/ 4GB and 9400M Nvidia GPU w/ 256MB shared memory. upgraded w/ EFI 1.7
Aside from the upcoming Snow Leopard, the main reason I upgraded was because I watch alot of online video. Netflix, Hulu, etc...I have read that the new GPU does alot of the decoding which keeps the CPU in single digits.I noticed something was sluggish the first time I started watching videos. Netflix had a vertical sync issue that I never experienced w/ my old MBP.Then today I was watching Hulu and I saw the processing or CPU jump to 112% and the base of my laptop was very hot.
Like I said I purchased the new MBP hoping to avoid cooking the family jewels. Anyone know what's going on and what I can do to stop this?
Does anyone else have video performance issues with the 15" 2.16Ghz MBP? I am working with 3gigs of RAM here, and yet videos skip and stutter CONSTANTLY! Initially it seemed to only happen to hd videos (720p), but now it seems to happen to any kind of video file I play. The player I'm using is VLC, as that seems to cause the least amount of problems. If I use quicktime it's worse. Could it possibly be caused by the slow (5400RPM) HD which is steadily filling up? I'm at a complete loss, and it's really making me hate this thing!
I've had my brand new 13" MBP with 128GB SSD for a month or so and love it. However in the last day, performance has dropped dramatically while watching video. I was on Hulu watching a high-res show, and about 15 minutes in, it started getting very choppy -- audio was OK, but video performance dropped. I quit, restarted, tried again, same problem immediately. System load was around 2.79. I tried in both Safari and Firefox, no dice. YouTube seems to have dropped now as well (I'm playing a video in another tab now, and again the audio is great but the video is choppy). I'm currently hooked up to a 22" LCD through the DVI output (the laptop itself is closed).
Is this normal? I mean I've got 4GB of RAM and 2.53GHz CPU with a solid-state disk! There should be 0 latency and this dual-core beast should tear through video no problem, and here I am closing off iTunes and other apps to try to spare some CPU (this doesn't work though). I've even switched to standard-res for both hulu and youtube but it's not much better. I am shocked that a brand new 2.53GHz CPU with 4GB can't handle this. I also installed and am now running Hulu Desktop to try to get better performance. The really weird thing is a week ago I was a on a flight chewing through YouTube while on Skype and using Entourage and iTunes all at the same time, and it was blazing fast. Now I'm crawling along like an old 1.6GHz with 512MB RAM. WTF, mate?
Just picked up a new Intel core 2 1.83 mini. Will I see a noticeable improvement by upgrading RAM with 2x2gb matched sticks and a 320g/7200rpm drive? How easy is it to reinstall the OS on a new drive? Can I use Time Machine to back it up on an external drive and reinstall?
Should I go for a 2.26GHz + 4GB ram mac mini for photoshop, illustration works, some video editing and my 3d studio Max the most. Does 2.0 & 2.26Ghz really tell the different when I am doing the rendering on my 3d max?
I was thinking of upgrading but I am not sure it is worth the money for the difference of what I have and what I will gain out of the new OSX? Is there much of a difference that I would gain on performance with a Mini 2009 2 Ghz 4 GB Ram OSX Leopard 500 GB WD Blue 5400 RPM.
Top music professionals are becoming quite concerned about Apple.It seems Apple is focussed in Video customers but they don't care that much about Audio customers (ex. soundtracks composers).See Logic Pro evoultion vs. FinnalCut, or Mac Pro updates.The new Macbook Por Retina is another example. No Digital output. No Analog or Digital input.
I have a 2009 2.53GHz MacBook Pro which I bought a couple months ago. It's been working great, but lately, I've been noticing a lot of strange issues with video playback/general graphics and UI. These includes:- Laggy video performance, frame skipping, generally 2x slow video -- on both iTunes and web video. It's not as smooth as it used to be, though admittedly not totally unbarable - VLC shows a black screen, doesn't show the video - Randomly pixelated icons in the dock (it's almost like the Mac picks a new one everyday to pixelate), dock animation not 100% smooth, although fairly good (not sure if it used to be this way)
I am looking to get a mac mini. If I was to get the Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz with 2Gbs of RAM how would it perform with Parallels Desktop? share any thoughts or experiences with your own macs. Main thing, will it run smoothly?
I've noticed something rather subtle at first. My new mac mini just did not give me any faster feel comparing to old one, as matter of fact my old mini seamed faster and smoother. After comparing minimize/maximize animations while holding shift on old and new system system by side, I have noticed that new one gives off as having 2 times slower frame rate or slight flickering when doing minimize, maximize and magnify effects on dock. Also gave some shabby feel comparing to old one.
After I have run XBench of both systems and 2 restarts, it came as consistent result that new system scored 125+/-4 vs old one 280 on OpenGL test, more than 2 times slower! I expected upgrade to be upgrade, not downgrade! What could be issue, it is supposed to be 5 times faster. Is it not tuned up or quite not ready drivers. Will this issue be fixed by apple anytime soon? I love apple but I feel disappointed that my old system gives smother user experience than my new one.
