Credit where credits due

[crashoverride77]

In midst of all the criticism of apple and its operating system I just have to say, El Capitan is amazing.
Speed, polish, reliability, no noteworthy bugs. I say its probably the best OS X in years, hands down.
Now if they could give iOS 9 the same love.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

I'm not the kind of person who judges an OS by how quick it can resize a window but until Metal apps arrive I can't judge it. I don't see any difference over Yosemite in terms of productivity and app speed yet.

What I do know is that opening or previewing large tiff files in the Finder is still crap slow and my 12 core Mac with GTX980 should handle that in almost real time in the year 2015, especially if it can handle modern games easily.

 

[aevan]

I'm not the kind of person who judges an OS by how quick it can resize a window but until Metal apps arrive I can't judge it. I don't see any difference over Yosemite in terms of productivity and app speed yet.

What I do know is that opening or previewing large tiff files in the Finder is still crap slow and my 12 core Mac with GTX980 should handle that in almost real time in the year 2015, especially if it can handle modern games easily.

My iMac 5K previews 4K tiff files very smoothly in El Capitan, and it has a slower GPU and CPU than your Mac Pro. Perhaps your disk drive is slow?

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

My iMac 5K previews 4K tiff files very smoothly in El Capitan, and it has a slower GPU and CPU than your Mac Pro. Perhaps your disk drive is slow?

Samsung Evo 850. Windows is on a HDD and previews big tiffs faster.

 

[leman]

I'm not the kind of person who judges an OS by how quick it can resize a window but until Metal apps arrive I can't judge it. I don't see any difference over Yosemite in terms of productivity and app speed yet.

Network drive access as well as Preview on large PDF files work much better now. That alone is a big productivity boost for me. Mail is quicker as well. The new notes are very useful. Mission control is much smoother (but its just a cosmetic thing).

 

[dingdong]

clean install or upgrade?

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

clean install or upgrade?

Wouldn't make a difference to performance if you choose either. A clean install just means you have more control over stuff you no longer want in library folders.

 

[crashoverride77]

I'm not the kind of person who judges an OS by how quick it can resize a window but until Metal apps arrive I can't judge it. I don't see any difference over Yosemite in terms of productivity and app speed yet.

What I do know is that opening or previewing large tiff files in the Finder is still crap slow and my 12 core Mac with GTX980 should handle that in almost real time in the year 2015, especially if it can handle modern games easily.

Well I can judge and its not just about window speed. I have used Yosemite for 1 year and although i did not have any major issues it did slow down at times, was jerky and just not as responsive. Entering full screen or mission control on yosemite was just... terrible.
My mac has been on and in constant use about 24/7 since ElCapitan, mainly coding and video editing. Not 1 slow down, or beachball or anything. Everything is so smooth now.

 

[Ebenezum]

Compared to Yosemite El Capitan does show some promise. However it currently has too many bugs (Disk Utility, Finder, etc.) and I'm going to wait several updates before I install it. Hopefully Apple fixes bugs quickly and I can rid my Mac Mini 2014 of dreadful Yosemite permanently!

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Well I can judge and its not just about window speed. I have used Yosemite for 1 year and although i did not have any major issues it did slow down at times, was jerky and just not as responsive. Entering full screen or mission control on yosemite was just... terrible.
My mac has been on and in constant use about 24/7 since ElCapitan, mainly coding and video editing. Not 1 slow down, or beachball or anything. Everything is so smooth now.

I've had the time to benchmark El Cap further and it is extremely slow for a modern OS. Sometimes it won't even generate thumbnails for folders of large images. In tests Windows 10 is 3-5 times faster at handling TIFF, PSD, and RAW files. In fact, Yosemite is slightly better and Mavericks is much better.

People have been talking too much about resizing windows and
Mission Control. They took their eye off the ball and forgot about how the Finder performs with large files.

I'll keep testing updates and upload videos after Sept 30. Because I really think evidence needs to be uploaded instead of people say 'OMG so smooth now' when they don't know how to measure performance.

 

[aevan]

Samsung Evo 850. Windows is on a HDD and previews big tiffs faster.

I find that hard to believe from extensive personal experience - on all machines I worked on, Windows 10 lags behind El Capitan in almost anything I've tried. I do believe you have issues, though. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact you're using a card that is not officially supported.

I just tested the preview with an uncompressed 15Mp tiff and it is instant, with a smooth zoom animation. iMac 5K, M290X, 16Gb RAM, Fusion Drive, El Capitan GM. I recorded it - so you can check it out from the link below. As you can see, it previews quite fast. Perhaps you're opening even larger files (I'd call 15Mp quite large) but I believe they would act the same, if not worse on Windows 10. It certainly isn't "crap slow" as you put it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671549/IMG_0573-2.m4v

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

I find that hard to believe from extensive personal experience - on all machines I worked on, Windows 10 lags behind El Capitan in almost anything I've tried. I do believe you have issues, though. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact you're using a card that is not officially supported.

I just tested the preview with an uncompressed 15Mp tiff and it is instant, with a smooth zoom animation. iMac 5K, M290X, 16Gb RAM, Fusion Drive, El Capitan GM. I recorded it - so you can check it out from the link below. As you can see, it previews quite fast. Perhaps you're opening even larger files (I'd call 15Mp quite large) but I believe they would act the same, if not worse on Windows 10. It certainly isn't "crap slow" as you put it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671549/IMG_0573-2.m4v

15mp means nothing on its own and without layers and adjustments is quite light work. You don't measure the performance from the number of pixels. You measure it from the size of the file. Bump that file up to 300+ MB in size (the file you tested was only 44MB - very light). Then add more than 10 of them in a directory. Then see how El Cap and Win10 handle the situation. El Cap is terrible at this and fails to generate all the thumbnails, while Windows 10 is pretty instant.

For the record Yosemite behaves the same way, also on our iMacs at work. I doubt they rewrote the Finder so if it performed poorly on Yosemite then that's not going to change overnight.

I'll make some video tests soon. I especially want to try out a 1.5GB image I've been working on - over 100mpixels if you want to know that measurement. A 15mpixel image weighing less than 100MB is something I haven't seen much of since maybe 7-8 years ago.

 

[aevan]

15mp means nothing on its own and without layers and adjustments is quite light work. You don't measure the performance from the number of pixels. You measure it from the size of the file. Bump that file up to 300+ MB in size (the file you tested was only 44MB - very light). Then add more than 10 of them in a directory. Then see how El Cap and Win10 handle the situation. El Cap is terrible at this and fails to generate all the thumbnails, while Windows 10 is pretty instant.

Ok, challenge accepted. I saved one of my large PSD files as a TIFF (please note, it's slightly NSFW). How does a 570Mb Tiff file with lots of layers and a resolution of 10908x8850 sound? Here is the recording of the TIFF file opening. I also tried it on the PSD file and it works the same.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671549/IMG_0593-1.m4v


I seriously doubt Windows 10 can pull this off, but even if it can, this is not "crap slow". If a 100 megapixel TIFF that is more than half a Gigabyte in size and has a lot of layers previews instantly - that is NOT slow. Also take into account that I have an i5 and, essentially, a mobile GPU. I'm sorry you have bad experiences with El Capitan, but I do believe it is a specific case and not a widespread issue. BTW, even if this didn't open instantly, I would not be disappointed. Opening 300+ Mb images is a demanding process.

As for 1.5Gb images - please, show me how Windows 10 opens them instantly, I am ready to be amazed

I've had the time to benchmark El Cap further and it is extremely slow for a modern OS. In fact, Yosemite is slightly better and Mavericks is much better.

I just read this.... and now I'm certain something is wrong either with your Mac or with your install of OS X. El Capitan is "extremely slow"?? And Yosemite is better???? That is just not true. I am not talking about the supersmooth UI animations (and they are supersmooth, by the way) - I'm talking about instant response to anything I do, from opening files, to launching apps, or switching between apps, or - yes, since you mentioned it - displaying thumbnails. I don't know what issues you have, but for me, the experience is quite the opposite. Using Windows 10 on an equally powerful PC as my iMac is a fine experience, but often with unexplainable lag and pauses (sometimes, a simple right-click on a file will cause everything to hang up).

 

[mikzn]

I'd have to agree with aevan. Must be something causing this but does not happen when I use preview or use the finder in icon view, column view or as cover flow.

I have some large photo libraries and checked some raw tiff pictures and they all open very quickly and are almost instantly viewable in the all finder views as well as opening very fast in Preview. Even EPS files open quickly.

In midst of all the criticism of apple and its operating system I just have to say, El Capitan is amazing. Speed, polish, reliability, no noteworthy bugs. I say its probably the best OS X in years, hands down.

Agreed, this is the best launch in my view of any OSX and it's not even official yet, am hooked and not looking back. iCloud drive is finally working well and syncing, love the notes and reminders updates, emails that prompt to add missing contact info, maps that finally work and sync properly, multiple display and airplay works better than ever, and most importantly everything just seems to work better.

Credit where credit is due

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Ok, challenge accepted. I saved one of my large PSD files as a TIFF (please note, it's slightly NSFW). How does a 570Mb Tiff file with lots of layers and a resolution of 10908x8850 sound? Here is the recording of the TIFF file opening. I also tried it on the PSD file and it works the same.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671549/IMG_0593-1.m4v


I seriously doubt Windows 10 can pull this off, but even if it can, this is not "crap slow". If a 100 megapixel TIFF that is more than half a Gigabyte in size and has a lot of layers previews instantly - that is NOT slow. Also take into account that I have an i5 and, essentially, a mobile GPU. I'm sorry you have bad experiences with El Capitan, but I do believe it is a specific case and not a widespread issue. BTW, even if this didn't open instantly, I would not be disappointed. Opening 300+ Mb images is a demanding process.

As for 1.5Gb images - please, show me how Windows 10 opens them instantly, I am ready to be amazed



I just read this.... and now I'm certain something is wrong either with your Mac or with your install of OS X. El Capitan is "extremely slow"?? And Yosemite is better???? That is just not true. I am not talking about the supersmooth UI animations (and they are supersmooth, by the way) - I'm talking about instant response to anything I do, from opening files, to launching apps, or switching between apps, or - yes, since you mentioned it - displaying thumbnails. I don't know what issues you have, but for me, the experience is quite the opposite. Using Windows 10 on an equally powerful PC as my iMac is a fine experience, but often with unexplainable lag and pauses (sometimes, a simple right-click on a file will cause everything to hang up).

I did ask you to reproduce this with a bunch of images in a folder, not one image on the desktop which will cache quite easily even on an OS many years ago.

 

[aevan]

I did ask you to reproduce this with a bunch of images in a folder, not one image on the desktop which will cache quite easily even on an OS many years ago.

Perhaps you want me to put my iMac underwater while I'm at it. No, I'm done recording - show me how Windows 10 opens a tiff this size, inside a folder with bunch of images or not, instantly - because I find it hard to believe.

In any way, I think I - and the rest of the people on these forums - have proven that El Capitan is anything but a "slow OS". And even if Windows 10 is better (which I seriously doubt), do you honestly think opening a bunch of 1.5Gb images should be instant?

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Perhaps you want me to put my iMac underwater while I'm at it. No, I'm done recording - show me how Windows 10 opens a tiff this size, inside a folder with bunch of images or not, instantly - because I find it hard to believe.

In any way, I think I - and the rest of the people on these forums - have proven that El Capitan is anything but a "slow OS". And even if Windows 10 is better (which I seriously doubt), do you honestly think opening a bunch of 1.5Gb images should be instant?

I was going to go to bed and do video tests after September 30 to give El Cap some more time for optimisations. But since you queried me I have decided to do a video for you that is uploading as we speak. Actually I discovered the file I have been working on is almost 3GB. The cropped version is about half the size. But let's test the full size uncropped one. Give me 15 minutes and the video will be ready.

 

[Dark Goob]

What I do know is that opening or previewing large tiff files in the Finder is still crap slow and my 12 core Mac with GTX980 should handle that in almost real time in the year 2015, especially if it can handle modern games easily.

Perhaps true Metal support is limited to systems that have officially supported GPUs. The GTX980 is not officially supported under OS X, and from what I read on reddit, NVIDIA's web drivers haven't been updated for this card for El Capitan yet.

Of course, one of the things I hate about Apple is that they don't produce a modular Mac with standard PCIE slots and drivers for common PCIE graphics cards. Why did they even bother selling us Mac Pros with PCIE slots if they weren't going to work with ANY PC graphics cards vendors beyond the initial release of the machine? Why can't they make a sub-$1500 modular, i7-based Mac minitower with PCIE slots?

It pisses me off!

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

To make this test fair I placed the test image on a separate hard drive instead of loading it from the desktop of either Windows or El Capitan. This meant the image couldn’t be cached by the OS in any way.

Test system : Mac Pro, 12 core 3.46Ghz, 24GB RAM, Geforce GTX980
Test image : house.tif
File size : 2.88GB
File dimensions : 19648 × 22080
Color profile : Adobe RGB
File location : NTFS formatted hard drive.

The test video:
----link removed----

I had to remove the link because Dropbox said I was using excessive traffic.

Windows 10
File opens immediately in Windows Photo Viewer and renders in 4 seconds.

El Cap GM1
QuickLook : file beachballs and opens in 22 seconds
Preview : app hangs and finally opens image in 24 seconds

This is just a single image test. Windows wins easily.

But that was only half my issue with El Capitan. When I have many more large images in a folder El Cap fails to generate thumbnails for them, which means I have to use Adobe Bridge to be be able to see which files I am selecting.

I wish we could just blame my graphics card’s Mac driver, but I see these issues even on Yosemite on iMacs at work. Bear in mind also that this graphics card that on Yosemite and El Cap can play the most graphically intensive games available without breaking sweat. You really can't blame it for these poor file operations that shouldn't be this slow and even with a much weaker graphics card.

Photoshop still opens files at normal pretty fast speeds, proving that the Finder and Preview need work.

 

[aevan]

Thanks for the upload and for the effort to record everything. I guess Windows wins this round, provided there is nothing wrong with your Mac. And one viewer may work with large files better, the other with smaller ones - you found a specific, rare case usage scenario where Windows wins vs El Capitan. For 90% of users, El Capitan will perform better - sorry to hear that in your case, things are the other way around. As I said, I encountered numerous random slowdowns and lag throughout Windows. Right-click menus freezing for a while, waiting minutes for Windows to start erasing files or uninstalling apps, waiting on Explorer to load (from SSD), etc. While OS X is far from perfect, it is certainly faster and more stable than Windows for the most part. Unless you want to open 3Gb files, it seems, as you have shown. For your specific usage case - perhaps you should switch to Windows. Good luck.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Thanks for the upload and for the effort to record everything. I guess Windows wins this round, provided there is nothing wrong with your Mac. And one viewer may work with large files better, the other with smaller ones - you found a specific, rare case usage scenario where Windows wins vs El Capitan. For 90% of users, El Capitan will perform better - sorry to hear that in your case, things are the other way around. As I said, I encountered numerous random slowdowns and lag throughout Windows. Right-click menus freezing for a while, waiting minutes for Windows to start erasing files or uninstalling apps, waiting on Explorer to load (from SSD), etc. While OS X is far from perfect, it is certainly faster and more stable than Windows for the most part. Unless you want to open 3Gb files, it seems, as you have shown. For your specific usage case - perhaps you should switch to Windows. Good luck.

Just don't see it as OS Vs OS. I want El Cap for my work and Windows for entertainment, so this is frustrating. The Finder has been bad for a long time now and I had to use Brudge to make up for it. But if Bridge can do it why has Apple slacked off? This is not rare case scenario. Just go to any big studio and any individual user is working on very large files daily. It's the norm to have 200-300MB files these days as a minimum. Your typical RAW file is 60-70MB before any retouch, comping and adjustment layers have been added. This is getting bigger every year and Apple hasn't stayed on top of it.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Perhaps true Metal support is limited to systems that have officially supported GPUs. The GTX980 is not officially supported under OS X, and from what I read on reddit, NVIDIA's web drivers haven't been updated for this card for El Capitan yet.

Of course, one of the things I hate about Apple is that they don't produce a modular Mac with standard PCIE slots and drivers for common PCIE graphics cards. Why did they even bother selling us Mac Pros with PCIE slots if they weren't going to work with ANY PC graphics cards vendors beyond the initial release of the machine? Why can't they make a sub-$1500 modular, i7-based Mac minitower with PCIE slots?

It pisses me off!

Nvidia has actively been developing OSX drivers lately and according to the tech sheets any GPU that supports Open GL 4.0 has full support for Metal. However...

Metal isn't being used by the Finder (Netkas has tested this), it's still OpenGL based Quartz rendering. Preview app isn't going to be deemed important enough for Metal either and will still being using Quartz.

The issue I'm seeing with volumes of large files and Finder slowness has more to do with the system's I/O and file handling operations than graphics acceleration.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Here is the Finder issue in Yosemite on an iMac (the same issue exists on over 40 various iMacs in the studio). When you have over a dozen or so large files in a folder. Bridge in the background has generated thumbnails. The Finder is not even trying. I was hoping it would be fixed in El Cap but Apple doesn't give a ****.

 

[Superhai]

The issue here is prioritizing. If you try the same on Windows but have say several thousand files in a folder, your OS will almost halt because Explorer is generating thumbnails, in Finder it will not kill your system, and the thumbnails will come after a while. I do however believe that the generation of thumbnails in Finder could be improved.

Especially comparing with using commands from terminal, there are unnecessary slowdowns both in Apples Finder and Microsofts File Explorer. I believe it comes down to choices made in how to present the files.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

The issue here is prioritizing. If you try the same on Windows but have say several thousand files in a folder, your OS will almost halt because Explorer is generating thumbnails, in Finder it will not kill your system, and the thumbnails will come after a while. I do however believe that the generation of thumbnails in Finder could be improved.

Especially comparing with using commands from terminal, there are unnecessary slowdowns both in Apples Finder and Microsofts File Explorer. I believe it comes down to choices made in how to present the files.

Right. It's 2015 and both companies have had plenty of time and money to make sure we have much better performance by now. Apple in particular has always been aimed at creatives and they should have realised our file sizes keep increasing every year and therefore the Finder has to be reoptimised regularly, not just every two years when they "claim" their latest OS frameworks are superduperfasterer than ever. They should spend less time making keynote graphs and more time actually using their OS with professional users.