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Why are people saying Big Sur feels faster than Catalina?

thadoggfather

thadoggfather

macrumors P6
Original poster
Oct 1, 2007
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feels more sluggish to me than 10.15.6, quad core i5 8/512 2020 Air.

maybe because Catalina has had more builds and is more mature but

the graphics drivers on my machine are sloppy and chunky. I'm finding even the waste of space in the UI and over-simplification to be a bit annoying and where it fits at home on touch devices, feels weird on a laptop

I don't 'love' Catalina either but its better than it was the first few builds.

Am I alone? Feel like I'm on crazy pills
 
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thadoggfather said:
feels more sluggish to me than 10.15.6, quad core i5 8/512 2020 Air.

maybe because Catalina has had more builds and is more mature but

the graphics drivers on my machine are sloppy and chunky. I'm finding even the waste of space in the UI and over-simplification to be a bit annoying and where it fits at home on touch devices, feels weird on a laptop

I don't 'love' Catalina either but its better than it was the first few builds.

Am I alone? Feel like I'm on crazy pills
Click to expand...
I can't speak about the current state of Big Sur but when I tried it in late August it was not good. I have the 2019 MacBook Air and the system was certainly not faster or even equally as fast as Catalina. The animations were stuttery and I got a lot of hang ups and sleep-wake issues. The slowness was apparent especially in Control Center where the animations were like 15 FPS. Truly horrible.
 
thadoggfather said:
feels more sluggish to me than 10.15.6, quad core i5 8/512 2020 Air.

maybe because Catalina has had more builds and is more mature but

the graphics drivers on my machine are sloppy and chunky. I'm finding even the waste of space in the UI and over-simplification to be a bit annoying and where it fits at home on touch devices, feels weird on a laptop

I don't 'love' Catalina either but its better than it was the first few builds.

Am I alone? Feel like I'm on crazy pills
Click to expand...
How big is your processor and how much RAM?
 
halofan56 said:
How big is your processor and how much RAM?
Click to expand...

8gb and quad core i5 in the 2020 Air.

Not an old machine. Not the fastest machine next to some well spec'd Pros, but not a 12" MB or one of years past, either.

heck, the thing's successor was just announced yesterday (the M1 late 2020 Air)
 
thadoggfather said:
feels more sluggish to me than 10.15.6, quad core i5 8/512 2020 Air.

maybe because Catalina has had more builds and is more mature but

the graphics drivers on my machine are sloppy and chunky. I'm finding even the waste of space in the UI and over-simplification to be a bit annoying and where it fits at home on touch devices, feels weird on a laptop

I don't 'love' Catalina either but its better than it was the first few builds.

Am I alone? Feel like I'm on crazy pills
Click to expand...
How big is your processor and RAM?
 
The latest beta update seems significantly faster for me. Apps are opening very quickly. Logic opens within about 3-4 seconds now. Used to take closer 8-10 seconds. Things are definitely feeling snappier for me. I'm on a 2018 Mac mini with the i7 and 32gb of RAM.
 
thadoggfather said:
8gb and quad core i5 in the 2020 Air.

Not an old machine. Not the fastest machine next to some well spec'd Pros, but not a 12" MB or one of years past, either.

heck, the thing's successor was just announced yesterday (the M1 late 2020 Air)
Click to expand...
Well, 8 gb is part of your problem. Unless to downgrade back to Catalina. When I ordered my 27" iMac back in June, I ordered it with 32 GB. I added 32GB more thru third party memory sticks.
 
halofan56 said:
Well, 8 gb is part of your problem. Unless to downgrade back to Catalina. When I ordered my 27" iMac back in June, I ordered it with 32 GB. I added 32GB more thru third party memory sticks. Your processor can limit you on speed.
Click to expand...

32GB (or even 16GB) being the culprit for basic uses on Big Sur is patently absurd.

I'm not talking about video editing, multiple VM environments, compiling, etc.

Especially when M1 machines ship with 8gb, and only go up to 16gb.

This can't be the situation.
 
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halofan56 said:
Well, 8 gb is part of your problem. Unless to downgrade back to Catalina. When I ordered my 27" iMac back in June, I ordered it with 32 GB. I added 32GB more thru third party memory sticks.You know I wasn't crazy about Catalina at first, but after (7) updates, it's pretty polished. I had MBP when Catalina came out, then went to the iMac.
Click to expand...
 
I'm having the same sluggish performance on my 2019 iMac core i5, 8gb ram, 1tb storage. i updated to RC2 this morning and i've noticed it to be a lot slower than than Catalina, even things like logging in to my profile is slower. i'm going to give it a couple of days so all the indexing is finished and then hopefully that solves the issue.
 
This is what I’m afraid of. Just got my base model 2020 pro with 16gb ram and it’s running perfect with Catalina. Just downloaded latest Catalina security patch, not enough use to compare to previous.
Big Sur is designed with m1 in mind, so I think it’ll cripple my machine.
 
I just got my i7 Mini at the end of June so only ran Catalina for about 3 months before moving to the beta, honestly didn't notice a bit of a difference at all. Big Sur's been running just as smooth if not smoother then Catalina did (and my Pro running Mojave). Logic still works exactly as expected, all my plugins are here, all my apps are here now (thanks Rogue Amoeba). Fine here with 16GB, although I dont use much of anything in Logic other than recording and mixing. No writing and no virtual instruments here really.

Just from past experience with OS X, yeah 8GB might be enough to RUN an OS but MacOS wants about 8 all to itself in order for things to run like they should, otherwise things aren't so happy happy joy joy. Windows 10 doesn't exactly gallop along with 8GB either. Its more like a slow jog.
 
my 2016 macbook has 8gb ram, and is (of course) not a monster; but i live on it (i do my real work on an imac), and big sur (finally) does feel a little smoother than catalina did... which was fine here too.
 
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Monotremata said:
I just got my i7 Mini at the end of June so only ran Catalina for about 3 months before moving to the beta, honestly didn't notice a bit of a difference at all. Big Sur's been running just as smooth if not smoother then Catalina did (and my Pro running Mojave). Logic still works exactly as expected, all my plugins are here, all my apps are here now (thanks Rogue Amoeba). Fine here with 16GB, although I dont use much of anything in Logic other than recording and mixing. No writing and no virtual instruments here really.

Just from past experience with OS X, yeah 8GB might be enough to RUN an OS but MacOS wants about 8 all to itself in order for things to run like they should, otherwise things aren't so happy happy joy joy. Windows 10 doesn't exactly gallop along with 8GB either. Its more like a slow jog.
Click to expand...
I agree with this. 8GB will get the student or light usage user by just OK. Its still the default on all the non-pro laptops. That being said, 16GB is where most professionals using Macs should start to look. I have a 2020 MBA i5/16/256 and it hits a wonderful sweetspot in performance/weight/cost.
 
I got a 13 2020 32gb ram and I can't make the fans come on with my usage😂 but Big Sur feels smoother than Catalina to me!
 
and I love the new wallpaper
 

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Well, I did a fresh install and it's just a feeling.

Besides that: Safari could be start faster. All the apps start slower than on Catalina.
 
big sur is a little better on my 12" macbook (8g ram), and feels about the same on my imac (16gb ram), a thoroughly-unscientific observation).
 
Zero science here as well, but I find that on my 5 year old iMac, Big Sur runs very well. Faster than Catalina? Not to the naked eye. Equal I would say.

As for 8GB being enough, yeah it will run, but it will be constantly paging to disk for Virtual Memory which will slow things down. My iMac would be running significant swap @ 16GB RAM as well as when I increased to 24GB (under Catalina). When I finally jumped to 32GB, the machine finally has enough that it does not swap to disk. My personal experience, YMMV.
 
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