I now switched back to Sierra 10.12.6 + HFS again, and it is so much faster. The graphics performance of the recent nvidia web driver is about the same 10.12.6 vs 10.13.2 (final versions), but in Sierra, there are no weird slow downs and lags. Also HFS+ loads and writes many times faster than APFS on a SSD here. The difference is really impressive after you switch back again. I read that Apple has lot of problems since 10.13.0 with their nvidia models (unrelated to Renoise though, since Renoise lacks of a modern GUI base).
BTW. you can upgrade to High Sierra without converting to APFS (I would recommend that highly): After you downloaded the High Sierra.app from Appstore, you exit it. Then you start it from the command line, using the following switches:
/Applications/"Install macOS High Sierra.app"/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --converttoapfs NO --agreetolicense
Apple still has lot of work to do and let’s hope they will manage to fix this (does not seem like this):
-
nVidia mac users suffering from slowdowns over time, reported many times in mac forums
-
AMD mac users suffering from slowdowns over time, reported in mac forums
-
nVidia mac users suffering from lags and micro freezes, reported many times in mac forums
-
Lot of slowdowns in common apps
-
The performance loss caused by Spectre and Meltdown patches seem to be quite extreme, and more patches are following in 10.13.3. Let’s hope apple will optimize a lot more.
Btw. Microsoft now uses other CPU instructions for CPU prediction, and this only works starting Sky Lake. That means the performance loss is more heavy already on Haswell (even it supports PCID).
Here is some interesting reading:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/01/09/understanding-the-performance-impact-of-spectre-and-meltdown-mitigations-on-windows-systems/
https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-for-webkit/
Checker tool for Windows:
https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/1801/meltdownloswerden/spectre.png
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Speculation-Control-e36f0050
Checker tool for Linux:
https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/1801/meltdownloswerden/meltdown_intel_suse.png
https://github.com/speed47/spectre-meltdown-checker
Full transparency @ Apple, as always. Mac users are too dumb for such a checker tool.