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General discussion

Random Question: Why does OSX seem to run smoother than Win7

Jan 17, 2011 6:07AM PST

I've been trying to research this, merely out of curiosity, to no avail. I have faith that someone here knows tho...

I mean it might just be my own perception, but it seems that Mac/OSX seems to run so much smoother than Windows. Hardware specs aside that is.

Do macs pump out higher fps? do the screens have a higher refresh rate? I guess these questions seem stupid, but I can't figure it out. So for now, I'll just assume I'm seeing things... lol Wink

-Dr. Karl Happy

Discussion is locked

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I'd be willing to bet its just Apple's attention to detail.
Jan 17, 2011 7:42AM PST

Many people have pointed out the same thing about the difference between Android and iOS transitions, animations, etc. Its not that the hardware is incapable, its just that Google (and I'm guessing Microsoft) just doesn;t condier it a priority. My 7500 dollar windows 7 workstation is pretty bad@ss (8 cores, 24GB RAM, 1.5GB Quadra graphics card) but my lowly 27" dual core iMac at home seems snappier when it comes to transitions, window animations, moving things around on screen, etc.

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iOS used GPU accelerated rendering
Jan 17, 2011 7:54AM PST

Android does not render the UI using the GPU, scrolling etc is entirely CPU bound. And slower. This is because Google hasn't given enough importance to smooth animation to put that much of an engineering effort towards it.

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(NT) wow nice rig!
Jan 17, 2011 11:15AM PST
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3d modeling and rendering will eat the RAM and GPU up.
Jan 18, 2011 10:36AM PST

And I still hit a wall from time to time. Enough never seems to be enough :-P

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Well
Jan 17, 2011 8:06AM PST

Windows and OS X both use GPU accelerated UI rendering. But OS X is a little older, originally designed on slower hardware from around 2000, so by necessity they needed more optimisation because back then the OS's graphics felt quite sluggish.

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Older than you think.
Feb 7, 2011 2:46PM PST

While OS X may have debuted roughly in 2000, NeXTSTEP which it based on started way back after Jobs was fired from Apple in the mid 80's. Much of what you see in OS X, the Dock, the Finder/FileBrowser, Apple Mail, the amazing expandable Color Wheel tool, drag and drop application installations came from NeXTSTEP. I used to use it and it could run circles around Windows and MacOS 7,8,9 in it's day. Screen redraw would clobber anything from Microsoft and Apple. Rock solid. All based on Display PostScript. This while running on Motorola chips and later x86 Pentium 90's. Yes, much of what you have in OS X was around in the late 80's. It's just gotten even better and more stable.

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Well yeah
Feb 8, 2011 8:38AM PST

OS X basically is nextstep. Apple bought it and gave it a bit of work and a name change.

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This was discussed before.
Jan 17, 2011 8:07AM PST

Since Apple knows what hardware is in use they can make it work nicely. Microsoft has no control over the hardware so you get it rough to smooth depending on hardware in play and beyond that, the settings.

If you expect smooth you need a walled garden.
Bob

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Eh....
Jan 17, 2011 8:21AM PST

Microsoft knows what the majority of the hardware is like. And also, really, theres not much diversity out there any more. It's an Intel CPU with either and nvidia or ATI GPU. Same mix up you find on Macs. I'd argue that with how similar the components are out there that both PCs and Macs are built from, neither Apple and Microsoft have it much easier than each other.

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Try a modern browser!
Feb 4, 2011 11:17AM PST

Try the new beta version of IE9. It is optimized to use the GPU as much as it can.
It is noticeably faster then other browsers when it comes to graphic handling.
Since both Apple and Microsft hardware suppliers use the same chips, it is dependent upon the software to improve the "look and feel".

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true, but i clearly have good enough hardware...
Jan 17, 2011 11:16AM PST

or are you saying they dont optimize the software because of the uncertainty?

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also, can you point me to the discussion?
Jan 17, 2011 11:17AM PST

Because I still haven't figure out a real reason. thanks Happy

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Sure.
Jan 17, 2011 6:00PM PST

Research on google about Apple's walled garden. Dealing with some dozen configurations and known setups has been Apple's advantage for years. Watch Windows users hunt for drivers and updates. My apple friends don't do that.
Bob

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I don't accept the premise, but...
Jan 17, 2011 9:48PM PST

I don't accept the "OSX runs smoother" premise at all. That's a purely anecdotal comment. I don't notice that when I use a Mac at work vs. a similarly-outfitted (accent on similarly) PC at home. So?

But to Bob's point above, nothing could be truer, notwithstanding he might see that as some kind of "good thing". If Apple can't optimize its platform to run slick on a very, very, VERY limited number of machine types, then they've got a real problem. Windows has to run on a virtually unlimited number of different hardware combinations, and is beholden to third party OEMs to get their drivers optimized and for everything to play well together. Apple has never, ever had that problem.

Even so, I love Windows 7. Every so often I might find some little glitch here or there, but it's stable as hell, has lots of bells and whistles, AND runs EXCEPTIONALLY WELL on older hardware! I put it on my ancient Dell 600M Pentium M laptop, and it runs much better than when I had XP on it!

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I dismissed a few old Apple machines.
Jan 18, 2011 6:57AM PST

If you want to see OSX not run smooth, try it on the first gen intel based Apple laptops in the factory issue setup. You get to watch a beach ball and the one I used would get so busy the cursor didn't move smoothly.

Fast forward to the 2+GB, 2 or more core CPUs and better video systems and that all vanishes. It's still possible to get it to creep along if you toss AVCHD work on it but I've yet to see any machine be smooth under such work loads.

THE REALLY GREAT THING HERE IS you have a choice. We have cheap and plentiful Windows machines, Apple, Linux and soon, real soon some Android thing we haven't seen yet.
Bob

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Pfft
Jan 18, 2011 8:46AM PST

Try a few old and G3 systems if you think any Intel Mac is slow.

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None found around here.
Jan 18, 2011 5:59PM PST

All dead or gone here.

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I don't accept that promise either
Jan 18, 2011 6:49AM PST

Apple do not have it easier. If anything they have it harder because they aren't outsourcing driver development but have to do it themselves.
Windows and OS X run on a similar range of hardware, as everyone used the same chipsets these days.

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Really?
Jan 18, 2011 7:56AM PST

What AMD chipsets might that include, just for starters?

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AMD is only a minority of systems anyway
Jan 18, 2011 8:47AM PST

And I would wager AMD does way more to support windows than Microsoft does to support AMD.

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Neither do modern Windows users!
Feb 6, 2011 9:55AM PST

It is a pleasure adding a new piece of hardware and having Windows 7 automatically go out to the Web, find the proper driver, download it, run it and have you going in minutes! THe only problem I've ever had with that is when I added a piece of "legacy" hardware (about seven years old), where I hasd to do it manually. By the way, I've spoken to Ap[ple owners who are disappointed that they cannot run much of their old hardware. I sppoke to someone at the company I worked for, who was upset that a $2000 piece of video equipment was rendered useless by an OS upgrade. That piece of equipment was only 2 years old! I'm sure that this isn't the norm, but nonetheless, it is a real sock ine puss...

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Great Answer
Feb 4, 2011 9:17AM PST

Bob that is the best answer I have heard on this question. And this is coming from a Mac user. Great job. That is the one thing I hate about Mac is the closed experience on it.

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It's all about control.
Jan 19, 2011 12:11AM PST

Apple controls most of the hardware that goes into a mac. It's a lot easier to make an OS for a system when you know the hardware inside and out. That's why if you used the hack Tom had up a few years ago to put OSX on a windows machine, the performance was crap.

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Exactly
Jan 19, 2011 2:47AM PST

If we're talking about desktops, PC users have an almost infinite variety of ways to customize them with various pieces of hardware. Mac desktops? I'm sure you can TRY to customize them to your liking, but there's no guarantee everything you would want to put in a Mac hardware-wise would even have drivers. They just aren't available.

And that goes directly to the point that Microsoft's Windows needs to run with all of these variant combinations of hardware--and they have no real control over how well OEM's have designed their drivers-- whereas Macs/OSX is designed to run on a very small lineup of equipment by comparison. And when I'm talking about hardware, I'm starting with the motherboard, the various chipsets, the various CPU's, the various internal components, etc., etc., etc. It stands to reason, then, that OSX should run very efficiently on the very limited set (by comparison) of hardware that's utilized by Apple by design.

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Nonsense
Jan 19, 2011 5:59AM PST

It's really a distinction without a difference. Macs and PCs both use the same hardware. With similar performance.
Additionally Microsoft has a lot more help to support the hardware from the vendors. Infact usually they have nothing to do at all, with the hardware makers making hardware with drivers, for windows. Not the other way around. Microsoft just provided a spec, and the hardware makers optimise around Windows!
Apple's walled garden actually requires more engineering on their part, they have to write the drivers and do everything themelves.
As I've already said, the only reason OS X feels faster is it's been doing double buffered GPU accelerated graphics a lot longer, since 2000. And it was awfully slow on that old hardware which wasn't really up to the task back then so they has to put major engineering efforts behind optimisations.
When Microsoft did it in 2006 on Vista, they had much faster hardware to deal with. They didn't have to spend so much time on speed tweaking.

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You do understand...
Jan 19, 2011 10:54PM PST

that your argument is pretty tortured, right?! Microsoft has a lot more help to support the hardware? Isn't that another way of saying "Microsoft Windows ABSOLUTELY needs hardware manufacturers to write their drivers well so as not to in any way encumber the operating system and/or user experience"? I'd venture to say that the overwhelming number of hardware issues that might come up on a Windows system can probably be attributed to some driver issue, where the developer just didn't do something right or in the most efficient way.

Isn't that also another way of saying "Since Apple selects a very small set of hardware for their PC's, they have the luxury of engineering and/or tweaking the performance of this eminently manageable number of devices"?

If a company has complete control over the driver set --and doesn't have to deal with an unlimited number of devices-- then they are assured the drivers will (at least should) work well. Since there are literally millions of combinations of hardware in Windows-based PC's, there's no way Microsoft could write drivers for each and every piece of hardware, nor ensure that the ones that do run are the most efficient or might somehow degrade performance.

That, my friend, is a distinction WITH a huge difference.

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No.
Jan 20, 2011 1:38AM PST

First of all it's not as if OS X is any more issue free. Bugs happen regardless of whether a 3rd party wrote the driver or the OS maker did. It seems to make little difference in my experience. That is to say, Apple's drivers on their own system generally don't work better.
Look, everyone keeps saying Apple's walled garden makes it easier for them. But I really don't see how, I think it's something that appears to superficially make sense but in practises doesn't. If anything Apple is tasked with a lot more difficulties, things they have to do that on PCs Micrsoft gets to outsource to the likes of Dell, HP, nVidia etc.
There's a damn good reason to explain why OS X performs better. It's older and was designed to run well on slower hardware! That all it is.

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Well...
Jan 20, 2011 3:36AM PST

Why does Apple "have to do" these things you speak of??? Is there some kind of law that says they can't engage OEMs to assist in driver development for OS X? Or is it by choice (assuming it's true to begin with)?

Frankly, I can't believe that OEM's don't do that already, as Apple would have to reverse-engineer proprietary products if they didn't have at least a baseline of information on how to get a piece of hardware to work. If a hardware OEM isn't using open-source methods of accessing their hardware, where and how is Apple going to utilize the products??? It doesn't make sense.

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They do engage OEMs for assistance
Jan 20, 2011 5:08AM PST

They aren't an open source project, they can make deals with their suppliers and get all the info they need. But they usually do the coding themselves.

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I have the same problem with you
Jan 21, 2011 5:44PM PST

I have the same problem with you, but I don't know why.