Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Retina screens mean considerably more work. On Lion you only had a fixed size bitmap that could be moved around easily, but, with a high density screen, you have multiple densities that need to be computed and cached and that take at least 4x more memory.

Also, Catalina is doing a lot more work under the hood than Lion.

What I saw was not flickering, but that I could move the pointer faster than a bar could be rendered and that the UI opted not to render it in that case. Is that what you refer to?

View on HN

Apple didn’t release devices with Retina displays until they could be confident that such devices were at least no worse than non-Retina devices in pretty much any regard. They were faster, not slower. The sole exception to this may have been battery life, which if I recall correctly was a bit worse despite them having bumped the capacity up. (OK, so memory usage for screen buffers was also necessarily four times as high. But they still made sure they had enough memory for most people.)

That’s not at all true.

A few years ago I replaced a 2012 MacBook Air with a much more expensive 2016 MacBook Pro (with Retina display) and there was an obvious regression in UI responsiveness. It was bad enough that I regretted giving away the older laptop so quickly.

The difference is almost certainly the higher pixel count. At least as of 2016 the onboard GPUs in intel chips haven’t been fast enough to make the UI feel snappy. I ended up buying an egpu for my desk to make my external displays usable. The experience out of the box using the onboard gpu was awful.

Yeah, I imagine this is better with newer MacBooks, but my 2015 MBP can be noticeably laggy when opening mission control on a 4k screen. It used to be laggy on the built in screen until Metal was introduced.

Can confirm. My data points:

1. MacBook 12" 2015 feels dramatically faster at 1x scaling vs. 2x, even with the same output resolution (2560x1440@1x vs. 1280x720@2x.)

2. Mac with 8GB RX 580 GPU. With >1x scaling, as I add load (i.e. Chrome tabs) it eventually runs out of GPU memory and starts paging to system RAM. The whole thing grinds to a halt at that point.

The rendered pixel count makes this effect worse -- dual 4ks are slower than a 5k, is slower than a single 4k, is slower than dual HDs. This is to be expected, but we're talking about an 8 gigabyte GPU, and the framebuffer sizes should be a tiny drop in the bucket.

None of this happens at 1x scaling. Running a native (2x) scale factor feels a little faster than a downscaled (2x -> 1.5x) scale factor.

As far as I can tell, load and GPU mem usage scales with:

(number of GPU applications * total rendered pixels) ^ k.

At 1x scaling, k is close to 1. At HiDPI, it's greater than 1.

> This is to be expected, but we're talking about an 8 gigabyte GPU, and the framebuffer sizes should be a tiny drop in the bucket.

It depends on how many high dpi bitmaps at full depth are kept. Uncompressed HDR 4K gets large pretty quickly.

And then it's not one bitmap, but multiple layers - backgrounds, rendered text...

Right. Say -- pessimistically -- that I'm on a 5k display (14Mpixels) at 8 bytes per pixel, and double buffered, we can do about 35 copies of that display in GPU RAM. This seems about in line with my experience.

And this is where I don't know what to think because "keep it all in vRAM" is clearly a terrible algorithm, and I have faith in the macOS developers, and yet my data suggests that this is exactly what they're doing. I don't see things swap out when there's memory pressure; it just keeps on allocating until it's full, then spills over to system memory and makes everything slow.

Counterintuitively, the iGPUs have an advantage here. They always run from system memory but they have a faster path to system memory -- they don't need to operate over PCIe -- so (a) you don't have a large perf gap between the 'full' and 'not full' cases, and (b) spillover doesn't hurt. You use a lot more RAM, but you can buy more of that. I can't easily add RAM to my GPU. At best I can double it, and that just means 70 Chrome tabs instead of 35.

I'd love to hear from someone at Apple who's seen the internals of this.

I cheaped out and got an external gpu with 4GB of ram. I think it was a mistake - those spills happen much more often than I’d expect, and I assume there’s much less bandwidth available over thunderbolt than you’d get with pci-e directly. So swapping in and out is worse.

I think successive software updates have made the situation marginally better - but I might have just acclimatised to it.

I’m very curious what the situation looks like with arm laptops when they launch. How will the graphics performance of an A14x chip compare to my situation at the moment? I assume they’ll be faster than intel iris graphics but slower than an egpu; but it’ll be very interesting to see!

I apologise to you and the others that have responded to me: clearly my fuzzy recollections of what I heard and read at that time are way off the mark.

Apple released the 3rd iPad generation with 4x the resolution of the prior generation, despite the GPU being absolutely miserable. The net result was that many graphical operations were much slower. It was a few more generations before the responsiveness caught up with the lower resolution 2nd generation. We know that they've done the same with Macbooks, going to dramatically higher resolutions while often relying upon the the iGPU that has only marginally improved.

There has never been a hard and fast criteria, beyond that ostensibly the benefits outweighed the detriments. I had a 3rd gen and enjoyed that super crisp display, so it was an okay compromise.

Add that recent software iterations have put dramatically more emphasis on power savings/efficiency, and are much more proactive about frequency scaling, etc.

As an aside, this post will be autodead, and that's cool. Love ya HN.

> Apple didn’t release devices with Retina displays until they could be confident that such devices were at least no worse than non-Retina devices in pretty much any regard

That's... not how it works. More pixels means more CPU, GPU and memory cycles to fill them and more DAC cycles to read them out and scan them to the display. That's just fundamental.

I really wish it wasn't doing more work under the hood. I can't really think of any features that were added to macOS in the last several years that were worth the bloat and instability that came with them. I guess I feel the same way about Windows though, every iteration past 7 feels like a downgrade.

>Retina screens mean considerably more work. On Lion you only had a fixed size bitmap that could be moved around easily

Didn't the first retina MacBook Pro ship with Lion?

I think the first Retinas didn't have fractional scaling. I think it was hard coded at 2x scale. Not sure, though. My 15" presents 5 possible scaling options.

I still use the first-generation retina and it does have the same 5 scaling options.

With the original OS?

IIRC yes but the scaled options were so laggy they were hardly usable. It improved with updates.

Cool. Thank you. I didn't remember the UI details.

Technically, fractional scaling doesn't exist on macOS: it's integer upscaling to the nearest ceil(scaling), followed by downsampling.

The late 2013, 13" retina MBP shipped with Mavericks. It looks like a "Mountain Lion" version shipped earlier that year. Unsure if there were earlier ones.

EveryMac.com says that the mid-2012 retina MBP shipped with 10.7.4.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...

And yet the UE5 demo can run at a stable 30fps on a console.

Computers aren't slow any more. Even laptops can render a menu bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com