Safari 4K YouTube playback is a blessing performance-wise

[chris4565]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to point out how amazing the 4K YouTube playback under Safari is. Not only is this now possible whereas it was only possible with Chrome for the past 3 years but the performance difference is tremendous: I have a 13" 2017 MacBook Pro. With Chrome 4K/30 worked well but 4K/60 was stuttering like hell. Now under Safari 4K/60 is smooth as butter.

Just wanted to point out this huge performance difference because I didn't see anyone mention this yet.

Have a great day!

 

[alisalem]

I can certainly see why. Here's the difference between Chrome and Safari playing the same 4K video on YouTube. This is on a 2019 iMac with i5 and 580X GPU.

My biggest issue with Safari is how sluggish it can be for scrolling — which is very unusual. Scrolling through Twitter and Facebook is not ideal at all, so I have to resort to using Chrome.

 

[chris4565]

Oh wow, that explains why. Didn't expect the difference to be THIS huge.

 

[chris4565]

This is incredible: I just tested 8K/30 playback and even that is smooth. Side-effect: It's very resource-intensive and I got the message that I ran out of program memory rather soon when I was opening Discord simultaneously

By the way, 8K/60 is by far too resource-intensive and very stuttery.