MacBook Pro :: Slow Video Performance And Graphics On System
Apr 29, 2010
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 seeing very slow performance when using spaces and expose in 10.6. I am on a mac mini with the 9400m graphics chip. It worked perfectly in Leopard, and now it runs at what appears to be 1fps. Sometimes it doesn't even seem to animate, it just jerks into place, from starting point to the end. I realize one solution could be "do a fresh install" but that seems like quite the pain at the moment, and is extremely undesirable. The upgrade worked perfectly on my macbook pro with similar specs. Is there anything I can reset or reinstall that might refresh the graphics performance?
1) I am in the possession of a June 2004 PowerMac G5 DP 1.8. 2) It's the AGP+PCI variety (not PCI-X, not PCIe). 3) It's running Leopard 10.5.8 4) I've got an Ultra 6800 DDL installed.
Main Question:
What is the best way to add another (3rd) monitor?
I have an external USB drive attached to my iMac. I've noticed that whenever there's heavy read/write activity on the drive (such as un-raring a large file or transcoding a video that's stored there), my whole system feels sluggish.
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.
Just upgraded to a 27" quad-core iMac yesterday and I noticed the startup time is much slower than it should be once I migrated all of my files from my old 24" iMac over. I usually keep my system up for months at a time, so startup time isn't an issue, but the question is: Does a slow startup time indicate that once I'm up and running, the system could be much quicker, too, or is that slow issue solely restricted to just the startup time?
What I have: MBP Penryn 2.4 Ghz, 2 GB, 200 HD, Matte. What I'm looking at: Unibody 15" MBP 2.53 Ghz, 4 GB, 250 HD, Glossy. Love the new trackpads on the MBP, not sure how I'll like the glossy screen. Would be doing some video work down the road (Canon HV40). Please tell me the difference between the performance of these graphics cards and lastly which one you would opt for.
I have been reading that several people are seeing much cooler temperatures on their Mac notebooks and they think it's due to better graphics drivers with the update to 10.6.3. I however thought about the huge performance hit in OpenGL going from Leopard to Snow Leopard (probably same thing). So I decided to check my OpenGL results after installing 10.6.3. However, I didn't check my xBench results before upgrading to 10.6.3. I went and found an old result which shows 67 points for "OpenGL Graphics Test." My new result for "OpenGL Graphics Test" is 111 points. When I check the xBench archives, people with rev "C" MBA's with 10.6.2 all show OpenGL Graphics Test scores in the 60s.
If this is correct, we could all have some big improvements that really show huge effects on the MBA. It should help everyone running Snow Leopard. It should lead to graphics performance gains and lower heat due to graphics demands. Could someone else running 10.6.2 on a 2.13 GHz CPU MBA run an xBench test before the 10.6.3 upgrade? Then upgrade to 10.6.3 and run another xBench test. Then please report back here with your results for OpenGL Graphics Test and hope this result is great for all of us. I believe this would be a big improvement for the original MBA too?
I just noticed that Xbench gave me a better OpenGL score on my new late 2008 MacBook compared to 10.5.5, so I was wondering if anybody knows how much better the graphics performance actually is in 10.5.6? Although I just traded in my old white MacBook with a crappy intel graphics card for the new MacBook with a rockin' graphics card, I am curious how much the 10.5.6 update improves performance on the intel graphics cards. Can anybody compare the OpenGL results from 10.5.5 and 10.5.6 to see if I'm the only one who is seeing an improvement. Did Apple update the graphics card drivers or is there some other reason I'm seeing better performance?
I have a macbook pro, 2.4 ghz, 2 gb ram, graphics nvidia geforce 8600 - it's about 3 years old.
The problem is that my mac is becoming slower and slower, sometimes it becomes unresponsive with simple tasks such as loading several tabs in the browser (i normally use firefox). And it happens too with photoshop, illustrator and basically any software.
The worst, is running 3D software in it. Some few months ago i could work fluently on a 3D project, now i just can't make anything that it just breaks down or crashes. Even scrolling windows is a pain in the b*tt. I know that 3D software might be way too heavy for a 2gb ram and my graphics ain't the best... but i'm sure something is wrong with my computer because it was working fine some months ago...
I've been making software updates, i use Onyx like once a week to run the scripts, i've made a SMART hardware checkup and it says it's everything ok...
The harddrive is 160 gb and it has 20gb free space. It doesn't have much space left, but i don't think this could be the source of the problem.
Could it be a graphics card problem? i've been looking for drivers update in nvidia website, i can't find them for mac.
Or maybe some more extra ram could resolve the problem. But i don't know if i want to take the risk of spending 200 euros on + 4gb for nothing..
Below are the specs to my Macbook pro and current version of the OS. I've been thinking about upgrading my OS but wondering if this will slow down my system. The only reason why I am considering to upgrade is because I want to purchase the Roxio Toast 10 Titanium and noticed its requires 10.5. Is it worth me to upgrade? If so how do I go about...I'm new to the macworld so I assume just go to the app store and ask for the cds to upgrade to the latest version?
System Version:Mac OS X 10.4.11 (8S2167) Kernel Version:Darwin 8.11.1 Boot Volume:Macintosh HD Capacity is 111.47 GB Available 65.88 GB
Model Name:MacBook Pro 15" Model Identifier:MacBookPro2,2 Processor Name:Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed:2.16 GHz Number Of Processors:1 Total Number Of Cores:2 L2 Cache (per processor):4 MB Memory:1 GB Bus Speed:667 MHz Boot ROM Version:MBP22.00A5.B07 SMC Version:1.12f5
give me a good explanation from a modern-day perspective, of the inconsistent video performance of my iBook (12" G4, 1.07GHz, 1.25GB, Radeon 32MB GPU?) It can play a DVD at full-screen, full sound without missing a beat, but can't play a lo-res YouTube video without stop-motion and clipped audio. I can plug in a USB webcam and do a real-time video chat, but if I record the stream, it plays back at, like, 2fps or less.
I just installed 8 GB Crucial memory for my 13" MacBook Pro (Late-2011; 2.8 Ghz). I immediately noticed scrolling on safari was jumpy or skipping. It is like this in other applications as well. Even zooming in/out of pdf's and using iphoto. I only purchased this laptop in Feb, and this bothers me. I tested using the Geekbench app. Every benchmark was about equal or much higher except for Processor Integer Performance, more specifically "Image Decompress multi-threaded scalar." It went from 138.3 down to 134.3 Mpixels/sec. Do I have lemon memory? I would almost rather go back to the 4 GB if this laggy performance is a continual issue. One of the things I love about Mac's is now becoming irritating.
Just want to hear some User Experiences with it so far Kinda more interested in the new graphics card performance...like what around what year of games can it play on the highest settings with great framerate? (speaking about the 13inch specifically)
This seemed like the most logical place to ask this, since the Mac Pro forum seems to be where all the higher level hardware/software modification discussion is. Currently the Starcraft 2 beta is suffering from horrible performance problems. Many of the threads I've read on their support forums point to graphics drivers as the main culprit, with DirectX->OpenGL porting being close behind. The main problem with both seems to be shaders.
One thread I found, however, is in reference to performance on Hackintosh machines. Apparently Hackintosh users, who all use custom graphics drivers for specific graphics cards (ones not ever supported by OS X, like the GeForce 9800) are getting performance on par with boot camp users, at similar settings. So my question is this: is it possible to write custom graphics card drivers for normal mac users (I myself use a flashed 4870) that optimize the use of extensions for shader intensive games like SC2? If so, where should I start looking to figure out how?
If there's no refresh this coming week, we're pretty much going to be forced into settling for one of the 27" iMacs (we're on our third) and hooking up a second (probably 24") monitor to do color sensitive work.
Does anyone out there have a dual-monitor setup running with the 27"? I was wondering if you notice any sort of graphics performance hit with the second monitor attached.
I have a Black Macbook. 2.2ghz, 1GB Ram, running Snow Leopard. Recently I've been finding my laptop rather sluggish and slow when performing tasks and opening applications. Firefox will often be quite slow at performing mundane tasks as well as flicking between applications that are open which is also slow. I use a couple of apps to help clear out unnecessary files etc to help with performance and stuff but clearly this doesn't appear to be working.
I have a 2 x 2GHz Dual Core Intel Mac Pro, with 9GB of DDR2 RAM and 2 Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphic cards each running a Samsung 24 inch screen. I recently bought Call of Duty 4 and found that the game runs terribly on anything higher then around medium sort of settings. I know the 7300 Graphic cards aren't the best for gaming, but they have done the job for me perfectly until now. I'm a photographer so I calibrate my screens with a Spyder and run a separate colour profile through each video card per screen, and its always calibrated perfectly.
I'm just curious if there is any actual performance advantage of having 2 video cards other then running a separate colour profile through each card? So for example, If I'm playing call of duty and only 1 screen is displaying information, does the other card just sit there, or does it jump on board and process information for the game being played? Because I would have thought having 2 7300's would somewhat give better performance during gaming then just the one?
Has anyone ran some tests with the new Snow Leopard Graphics Update Apple just released. I am primarily interested in the performance increases it offers SC2. I am at work and will not be able to install it until late tonight, after which I will post before and after FPS and settings for SC2.
I run Rhino (64 bit) with windows 7 through bootcamp. The software mfg's recommended graphics card is the AMD FirePro v7900 or v5900, and user group recos the nvidea quadro 4000. I am currently using an Nvidea gtx285 and driving two displays from it. Looking to upgrade both memory and video card for optimal performance.
Info: Mac Pro, Windows 7, osx 10.7 , 16g ram nvidea 285gtx
my early 2011 macbook pro graphics *****. Battlefield 3 lags on low. Exporting videos is slow aswell. Is there anyway to make it work better? For a laptop that I paid 2000 dollars for it should work a lot better than it is.
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?
If I was to hook my MacBook Pro 13inch 4GB RAM, 250 HD to a monitor and use the Magic Mouse and Apple wireless keyboard would it slow the performance of my laptop?
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...
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?
I'm not exactly hardware savvy, so please bear with me.I've been looking into some cool video games for my MacBook (white, couple of years old, Leopard), and it appears I need a new video card/graphics/whatever. I think it's GeForce or something.I've heard in the past that the video card/graphics could not be upgraded in the Macs. Not sure if this is true or if it has changed.Is there any possible way on Earth that I could send the MacBook into a shop and get the video card/graphics updated? It doesn't have to be Apple; a genuine third party would do.
I'm using Yosemite, yet many of my application like Pixelmator, Autodesk inventor, says " this application requires OS X version 10.6.7 or higher". Also when I go on Youtube or other sites, only black box appears, no video loads. While playing a video on my hard disk, I can hear only audio but no video is displayed. Transition effects are slow and can not hear or see and preview of audio or or video files. I tried AHT hardware check but it says no errors found.
