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Is El Capitan faster than Mavericks?
- Thread starter MacMartyr
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I have Mavericks and El Capitan dual booting on my MacBook Air (2014), and in this early stage, I notice little difference in their performance.
Finder performance are back to Mavericks level (in Yosemite it slow down even when resizing a small window, and even the selection rectangle lags).
I have a MacBook Pro 4,1 2,4 ghz 4GB ram and nvidia 8600M GT 256mb which was running Yosemite animation was slow and performance was not that good, recently downloaded to Mavericks and now installed El Capitan to a new partition it on par with Mavericks i think, and much smoother and faster than Yosemite.
This is good news, its only DP1, but yet you guys can already see an improvement.
Taking a leap of faith but the further DPs and public betas may be even faster.
This! I have no idea how these types of issue slipped QA...
Any person who uses Finder for more than 2 minutes will easily discover huge performance issues.
This is good news, its only DP1, but yet you guys can already see an improvement.
Taking a leap of faith but the further DPs and public betas may be even faster.
From what I see now, El Capitan is:
A) Definitely faster than Yosemite, no matter if the graphics card supports Metal or only OpenGL;
B) Has the potential to be as fast as Mavericks on Mac post 2012 (support metal);
C) For cards that don't support Metal (2011 and before), El Capitan will be less fluid than Mavericks.
I've not noticed a slow-down from Mavericks to Yosemite. But then, I'm running a fairly new iMac with i7 processor, full RAM and upgraded video card. I suspect the speed boost I'm seeing with El Cap over Yosemite will be seen by any computer it runs on, to varying degrees.
Not as smooth as Mavericks, especially when blurring effect ("vibrancy", in Apple's terms) applies to significant amount of area. But for everything else, it is acceptable and usable.
However, it is noticeably more fluid, and less buggy (not in terms of 3rd party app support, as that's not the point of DP1) than Yosemite.
I think it's too soon to make this declaration. We are at the VERY FIRST beta, there's plenty of time for further optimization. I have no reason to believe that it will be less fluid than Mavericks on pre-2012 machines once completed.
Well, I don't think that's the case. I have a mid-2011 21.5" iMac and OS X 10.11 is significantly faster than any previous OS since Snow Leopard, at least in UI animations. It crashes a few times a day (it's a beta) but otherwise is fast and responsive.
At least, for me.
For me it's been very stable. I've not had a single crash. The only thing I can't do right now is edit video on FCPX. It launches and presents the normal interface on the desktop, then promptly closes. Everything else is working great so far.
So is it reasonable to assume that post-2012 Macs running El Capitan are already currently as fast as/faster than Mavericks? I'm still running Mavericks and I'm not sure if it'll slow down my Mac.
For now, it's:
a) *as fast* in some areas (most day-to-day-things such as using Notes, iTunes, Spotify, Pages, etc.);
b) *faster* in some other areas (Speed of launching apps on spinning hard drives, Window-resizing and full-screen switching, navigating through pro apps such as Affinity Designer, scrolling through webpages in Safari);
c) and *less fast* in minor areas (such as boot-up speed, the expansion of Stacks in Dock and drawing of blurring effects for text outlines, or scrolling through PDFs).
Yes, it's as fast on my system. UI actually feels faster to be honest, but I'm not booting a current Mavericksinstall so I can't do a side by side comparison.
When you say "upgraded video card", it sounds like you're talking about having upgraded it yourself. But since it's an iMac, particularly a recent iMac, I doubt that's the case considering Apple has been using irreplaceable CPUs, GPUs, and RAM lately.
Nope. When I bought my 27" iMac, the video card was upgradable at time of order. I have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB card. The RAM I did upgrade myself, because it takes about 10 seconds on the 27" iMacs, unlike the smaller models which, as you know, have chips soldered on to the motherboard.
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In general, it should be at least as fast as Mavericks, but there are areas where it may not be. The real killer is not having an SSD storage drive. If you still have a spinning HD, you're probably not going to like El Capitan (or Yosemite, for that matter). 16GB of RAM should also be the minimum threshold for El Capitan. 8GB is just enough for running the OS and doing basic things like email, notes, web, etc.
I am curious about the RAM requirements, in my experience El Capitan has better RAM management compared to Yosemite. I agree that Apples official requirements are shockingly low, I tested 10.11 on iMac 2007 with 2 GB of RAM (usually it has 6GB but I wanted to see how it would work with less RAM) and it was unbearable slow, beachball everywhere. I only used Safari and Mail with Activity Monitor and RAM use was constantly on the red. I wonder did Apple bother to test it with 2 GB of because it is clearly far too little even with minimal use?
I know using 10.10 or 10.11 with SSD is much better but iMac is for testing purposes only and I'm not going to spend any money upgrading it.
Based on my experience I am not certain how the most Core 2 Duo processor equipped Macs are going to fair with El Capitan, it was clearly slower than Mavericks (unsurprisingly Snow Leopard is much faster than both of them).