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| Graphics improvements give Mountain Lion that speedy feeling |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-02 21:48:52 |
| "Has Mountain Lion been feeling faster for you compared to Lion on the same machine? It's probably not just you: Mountain Lion appears to include improved graphics drivers and low-level graphics subsystem improvements. According to our testing, these improvements result in an approximate performance increase of up to 10 percent. Those improvements can make your current hardware feel faster despite the fact that your CPU can't magically crunch numbers any faster. The changes also lay the foundation for Apple to update OS X's OpenGL support in a more timely manner, which could potentially lead to better graphics performance in the future." |
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| Seems smoother to me |
| By Tony Swash on 2012-08-02 22:31:14 |
|
Every time a new version of OSX has been released I have planned to wait a while before upgrading and every time I have caved in and installed it on day one. For Tiger I actually queued at the Apple Store in Regents Street in London on the day of release to get a copy with 10 minutes of being released, I was around 700th in the queue, which was a bit silly but actually quite good fun. I have to say this seems one of the smoothest system updates I have ever done and my Mac just seems somehow smoother and a bit more responsive. It always takes a few days to tailor the set up to suit me and some of that involves trying to avoid new features which I don't like, but I suspect that this is just the result of the natural conservatism of someone who has used Macs (and Windows PCs) almost three decades, one just gets set in ones ways. This time it took me a day or so to work out how to get rid of the Duplicate item in the Edit menu and replace it with the familiar Save As item, this had been bugging me since Lion but this time I managed to do something about. |
 - Score: 4 |
| RE: Seems smoother to me |
| By Thom_Holwerda on 2012-08-02 22:37:57 |
| It was high time too. Mac OS X's interface has been feeling sluggish for several releases now. I'm very curious how it'll feel on my dad's iMac. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Seems smoother to me |
| By redshift on 2012-08-03 00:47:14 |
|
> ...trying to avoid new features which I don't like, but I suspect that this is just the result of the natural conservatism of someone who has used Macs (and Windows PCs) almost three decades, one just gets set in ones ways. This time it took me a day or so to work out how to get rid of the Duplicate item in the Edit menu and replace it with the familiar Save As item, this had been bugging me since Lion but this time I managed to do something about. I would be interested in what you did to change that. For most things I can live with it... but it gets unwieldy for large files (often I work with very large keynote files). Fortunately Adobe has not yet bought into the new Apple save method on creative suite where most of my large files lurk. On my iMac (24-inch, Early 2008) , Mountain Lion was a smooth update with no issues so far. It seems a little snapper after the upgrade. The only disappointments were a few missing features that were not supported on my computer like airplay. Edited 2012-08-03 00:49 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| excellent release! |
| By sergio on 2012-08-03 02:36:00 |
|
Lion release was a complete disaster... I used it for 1 week and went back to Snow Leopard. With Mountain Lion I'm having a total different experience, It is fast, stable and very polished. In a nutshell: Mountain Lion is what Lion should have been. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Comment by mutantsushi |
| By mutantsushi on 2012-08-03 05:09:08 |
|
OK, I love developments like this... Performance at both high end and low end (integrated) are awesome. Changes like this, as well as other performance related subsystems, and subsystems which may enable new development approachs, etc. are exactly what I look forward to in an OS release. All the iPod-ization UI stuff and changes which are basically APPLICATION updates (not OS updates) are really rather low on my list, even if might applaud a minority of the changes Apple is doing in that department. I get it that this stuff may not be 'front page' material in terms of their core marketing audience at this point (remember when it was?), but why the need for secrecy, why not have a detailed description of technical sub-system changes available for those interested in it? Not to mention developers who may be dependent on things like the OpenGL stack. |
| - Score: 2 |
| More than just graphics |
| By darknexus on 2012-08-03 07:27:38 |
| Speaking from my own experience, I think the improved performance is due to more than just accelerated graphics. I've noticed overall better memory usage and much less resource utilization overall, leaving more free RAM and CPU cycles to do other things. Offloading some graphics processing might account for some of that, but it seems there are other optimizations under the hood as well. I'm quite pleased about this, though Lion didn't feel ridiculously slow to me as some have said (in fact I had a much more pleasant time with Lion than Snow Leopard, which I found to be buggy as hell). |
| - Score: 2 |
| Experiences after 3 days |
| By avgalen on 2012-08-03 07:31:43 |
|
* Installed on my girlfriends MacBook with Snow Leopard. She is a Mac, I am a PC. (but we get along just fine) 1) Buying it and installing it was easy, but slow (about an hour download and 1 hour install) 2) There was no indication of which programs might not work (as I am used to see before the actual upgrade process starts on Windows) 3) After the upgrade the OS seems to work just fine, but slower than before 4) Mathlab doesn't work anymore because it uses X11. Installing XQuartz solved this 5) Her dictionary application (Japanese-English) doesn't work anymore because it used Rosetta (Power PC). No solution yet 6) "make" doesn't work anymore. She is using XCode for a major codebase (OpenCV) and even reinstalling hasn't solved this Conclusion: Slower and several business applications stopped working, but she is continuing troubleshooting instead of just downgrading. The "IOS"-ification is strong in this one. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Comment by mutantsushi |
| By Panajev on 2012-08-03 07:38:43 |
| iOS or MacOS X developer? WWDC videos are there to detail such changes :). |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Experiences after 3 days |
| By _txf_ on 2012-08-03 07:43:34 |
|
> 5) Her dictionary application (Japanese-English) doesn't work anymore because it used Rosetta (Power PC). No solution yet "No solution yet". I think you mean no solution ever (unless of course you try running an old version of PPC osx in qemu). Aren't there other Dictionary applications? Is the application unsupported? Just who is still using PowerPC applications? > 6) "make" doesn't work anymore. She is using XCode for a major codebase (OpenCV) and even reinstalling hasn't solved this You need to install the command line utilities from within Xcode. It is in the preferences. It should be noted that OSX does not come with gcc any more. Its default compiler is clang but it also has llvm-gcc ( not quite the same as gcc). |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Experiences after 3 days |
| By Panajev on 2012-08-03 07:46:08 |
|
> 6) "make" doesn't work anymore. She is using XCode for a major codebase (OpenCV) and even reinstalling hasn't solved this In order to slim down OS X and Xcode itself there have been a few changes that caused this problem of yours. Command line tools are no longer bundled by default, but available as an optional download you can trigger from Xcode itself (and they did a good thing let me tell you... no longer having to download 3GB or so of extra stuff at each iOS SDK point release). So, 1.) Install Xcode 4.4 from the App Store (free). 2.) Open Xcode, and in XCode's Preferences > Downloads you can install command line tools. 3.) Make it system-wide clear where these tools are: sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Con tents/Developer 4.) Accept the command line build utils license: sudo xcodebuild -license (scroll down and the you have to type accept or agree or something :)) |
| - Score: 2 |
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