Testing the New MacBook with Windows 10 ⇥ alexvking.com

Alex King (via Michael Tsai) found that the new MacBook draws the animations in Windows 10 really smoothly, but struggles with some animations in OS X:

Because Apple does not cap Mission Control at 30FPS or something else, and because inertial scrolling and Space-switching more frequently operate at 60FPS, it is reasonable to assume that Apple expects Mission Control to be able to reach 60FPS too. Thus, framerates in the high 30s and low 40s stick out.

Until thorough benchmarking is completed by me or someone else, I think the best way to put it is this: Task View often runs at 60FPS, while Mission Control never runs at 60FPS.

I think pretty much all Mac users — from owners of poky Mac Minis through high-end iMacs — have experienced super slow Mission Control animations. It’s just not a well-built animation.

It’s worth noting that Exposé never seemed to suffer from a similar problem on any Mac excluding the lowest-end products, and that was running on far worse hardware than what we have today. In fact, a fair amount of OS X’s animations are significantly slower than the Tiger days. I’m not sure what’s causing such a substantial performance degradation, but I hope remedying it is a focus of iOS and OS X this year.