macOS 10.12.6 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 Benchmarks

[schmidtbag]

What do you mean by smoothness here? One of the things that bothers me with windows on my laptop is how "async" everything feels. Like if I boot and try to search in the start menu it's just stuck, but it sorta kinda feels like it's responsive. To me it seems like there's a long queue of tasks that need to be completed before it will allow search to begin.

I'm not sure if this is what you're talking about but to me this smoothness on Windows feels way too much at times. Especially on older laptops.

Well, I'm not referring to anything that hasn't be loaded into memory yet, because that obviously skews results (even in Mac). When I say smoothness, I'm referring to the feeling you get playing a 60FPS video with no jitter and no tearing. Or, where something could be 30FPS but you don't readily notice the lack of frames.

[Guest]

It seems to me Mac intentionally sacrifices performance for smoothness, which for their client base I guess is a good choice (but I certainly wouldn't mind if they gave users the option to toggle it). I'd say Windows 10 caught up with Mac's smoothness. Maybe slightly worse, but it also has better performance.

Is GTK3 on Wayland not smooth? KDE with Wayland has been modestly smooth for me, albeit not perfect, but I imagine GNOME would be significantly better.

And this is bullshit. Care to explain how would it sacrifice performance for smoothness? When you launch fullscreen game it should run at full speed. Otherwise, it's shit design. The truth is their graphic stack is pure crap. Just like their kernel and file system.

[CapsAdmin]

Well, I'm not referring to anything that hasn't be loaded into memory yet, because that obviously skews results (even in Mac). When I say smoothness, I'm referring to the feeling you get playing a 60FPS video with no jitter and no tearing. Or, where something could be 30FPS but you don't readily notice the lack of frames.

I've had issues with this and youtube on windows and linux but this has been browser dependent for me. (more to do with codecs and such i believe?)

I work a lot with graphics and frame drops are important to me. But I can't say I've noticed any strange behavior like that on either platforms (windows and linux). However one problem I have with kde (or maybe it's x related) is that when GPU usage is 100% for one application the desktop becomes extremely unresponsive. This does not happen on windows, maybe because it prevents it from happening in the first place.

[schmidtbag]

And this is bullshit. Care to explain how would it sacrifice performance for smoothness? When you launch fullscreen game it should run at full speed. Otherwise, it's shit design. The truth is their graphic stack is pure crap. Just like their kernel and file system.

Calm down, kid. First of all, this conversation is mostly referring to desktop usage, not fullscreen games. Secondly, nobody gets this worked-up over such a simple claim, and only a child would jump to the conclusion that their graphics stack is "pure crap". Their graphics stack is outdated, but very stable and functional. Anyone who knows a thing or two about fixed-rate display syncing knows the more you buffer the display, the more performance you lose. Many people complain about input lag whenever they use triple-buffer vsync.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2794/2

I wouldn't be surprised if Mac (at least modern ones) use triple-buffering. Meanwhile, to my understanding, MacOS's graphics stack (Quartz) is a bit more abstracted than what you find in Windows or Linux. The more layers software has to go through, the more performance you lose. This is why you want to disable compositors in Linux.

I've had issues with this and youtube on windows and linux but this has been browser dependent for me. (more to do with codecs and such i believe?)

Maybe. My browser experience has been pretty decent in my Core2 Quad Hackintosh, with a GT 630. Pretty un-impressive hardware but it holds up.

I work a lot with graphics and frame drops are important to me. But I can't say I've noticed any strange behavior like that on either platforms (windows and linux). However one problem I have with kde (or maybe it's x related) is that when GPU usage is 100% for one application the desktop becomes extremely unresponsive. This does not happen on windows, maybe because it prevents it from happening in the first place.

I don't think it's a KDE problem and I'm not quick to blame it on X either - I think that's just a Linux problem. I'd say try using Wayland with KDE and see if the problem persists. I use KDE+Wayland on my "everyday" PC and get no responsiveness issues, but, I also rarely ever max out the GPU.
I have a rig dedicated for BOINC, which uses LXDE (with X, of course) and when maxing out the GPUs with OpenCL or CUDA tasks, the desktop is very un-responsive. If there's one thing [modern] Windows does better than any other OS, it's handling tasks with insufficient hardware (however, Windows is terrible at handling poorly-designed programs). It wouldn't surprise me if Windows' graphics stack has a GPU scheduler, which Linux doesn't seem to have. From what I noticed, Linux is relatively bad at figuring out how to prioritize GPU usage.

[andre30correia]

with new drivers and kernel probaly this numbers are even better for linux

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Haswell-era MacBook Air with Intel COre i5 4250U,

[oooverclocker]

It seems to me Mac intentionally sacrifices performance for smoothness, which for their client base I guess is a good choice

I think exactly the same. They have many effects that hide lags by introducing time sinks. Just like the intro videos you have to watch on consoles in order not to expose their slow HDDs.

For my person, I prefer immediate reactions. I like to have the new window open in the same millisecond I clicked on the button. Every effect, for example shifting the window in the task bar when you minimize it etc. is totally annoying for me. I just like it to disappear instantly and at the same time I like a sign in the task bar that this window is still open but minimizes.

I don't want to say that most people prefer productivity over "smooth" controls but I'm also sure that only few people prefer smoothness over agility.

[THIRSTY GNOMES]

Working help desk, I got to work alongside OSX, Windows, and Linux. Moving windows in OSX using the touch pad felt very smooth, almost as if you were moving the window by hand rather than the cursor. Can't really explain it. I have never noticed that with Windows or any Linux DE's

[Luke_Wolf]

You have to keep in mind, that OpenGL is somewhat like deprecated on macOS. You only get the full performance with Metal on macOS.

Oh yeah because OS X hasn't always lost on graphics performance /s

Reality is that OS X is just slow, and always has been. A large part of which is that there's not really been any incentive for them to be fast, whereas Windows had games to push it forward and Linux has quite a few applications of it's own where it needs to be fast: supercomputers, embedded systems, etc. OS X just doesn't really have that, and they're also tied down by the baggage of the Mach microkernel that their OS is primarily built around.

[uid313]

Is GTK3 on Wayland not smooth? KDE with Wayland has been modestly smooth for me, albeit not perfect, but I imagine GNOME would be significantly better.

I don't know if Wayland is any less good than Quartz or whatever its called, or if GTK3 is any less good than Cocao.
But just looking at macOS it seems much smoother than both Windows and Linux.

I am not sure why.
Maybe all macOS applications make good use of animations while they are not used much in GTK applications.
Maybe Cocoa automatically provides animations without the developer have to declare to use them but GTK applications needs to explicitly request the use of animations.
Maybe because Cocoa/Quarts does some synchronization things to make sure the animations are smooth and no frames are skipped.
Maybe because GTK animations are linear while Cocoa use some accelerated/deaccelerated animations using Bézier curve.

I have no idea. I really have no idea. I don't know why.