Retina Lag (High CPU activity)

Is this normal behavior? Idles on 13%. It really lags a lot too.

Other bad experience is that I can’t register plug-ins in the 64-bit version. It crashes regardless.

Running 32-bit now on a 15" MacBook Pro Retina mid-2012 that should handle this stress fine.

Have you loaded a very large song or lots of plugins?

Not at all. This track in Renoise show 22% CPU, but monitor is 120% more. Same behavior for every “normal” track that worked fine on slower machine witn lion.

Quite strange to see a CPU doing over 50% more than what it is capable of, i wish i had such CPU myself :P

A CPU load >100% in OSX seems to be totally normal on a multicore system.
As each core can have a load between 0 and 100% whereas your OS is simply adding the individual core loads to a grand total.

So for example, a dualcore system can reach up to 200% load, a quadcore up to 400% and a quadcore with hyperthreading support (one virtual core for each physical) up to 800%.
Your macbook is equipped with a hyperthreading enabled quadcore CPU. see: http://ark.intel.com/products/64900/Intel-Core-i7-3615QM-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_30-GHz

Renoise however measures the load differently - more like windows does, where 25% of load on a quadcore means that only one core is at 100% and the others are more or less idling. in this case, OSX task manager would report 100% load and renoise only 25%.

possible causes for your issue:

  • Check the temperature of your CPU.
    The retina macbooks are known to get really hot and even though your book is more or less still brand new, the cooling might be faulty and the CPU therefore overheating.
    Halfway modern CPUs (yours) perform thermal throttling as a kind of selfprotection. Throttling will kick in as soon as a certain temperature threshold is exceeded. Throttling would result in a drastic reduction of Vcore and CPU frequency and would therefore logically result in lags and bad performance.
    The Tjmax (aka TJUNCTION, aka the temp where your i7 is likely to die) of your CPU is 105°C. If you’re remotely near that temperature, throttling is very likely to kick in. i’m not sure when exactly it’ll start to throttle unfortunately, but i guess anything above 80°C would get things rolling…

  • I’ve read about similar cases (lags, bad performance) where the cause was a faulty battery. performance came back as soon as the battery was removed or replaced by a new one.

i never had a mac nor will i ever have one, so it’s just blind guessing :)

ugly OT: OSX, You’ve Gotta Love It.

ignore it.

Does it happen on any song, also the demo songs that come with the install, i.o.w just songs featuring native effects? Bet it is a vst(i) issue.

Yes, demo songs too.

I’ve temperature up to 90.

I think I’m in the same boat as these guys (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6606352204?page=1), but a SMC reset doesn’t do it for me.

Do you have an NVidia gpu in that device? Perhaps updating its drivers may do a deal as well.
I had a similar CPU usage discussion regarding AudioGL (not such high rates on my machine, but 45% for idling mode is still quite a lot), i had drivers from september this year, but updating to the october version meant a world of difference in CPU performance optimizations.

Yes, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. Will check out if I can update …

I’ve installed a FPS meter now and by just scrolling this page I get over 50 fps. The link I referred to earlier had problems with low fps, but my machine seem to handle this fine.

Watching the tracker when playing is awful. It lags a lot … even when playing without any third party plugins.

There’s no option to download driver for Mac there :(

Did not help.

Viewing 1080p on youtube still also lags every second.

If it doesn’t when the frame is at its default size, it might me the chipset driver.
The unfortunate problem with Macs though is that drivers for the main system components are depending on what Apple releases.
For Windows or Linux based platforms, there are usually more ways to a solution.
Mac’s used to run solid and efficient, but when it comes to adding proprietary hardware or external hardware where Apple developers have no or a very low share in the development of its drivers, the efficiency seems to drop a lot.

Here’s a video to show what happens

Hooked up an 27" Cinema Display today. Renoise ran smooth as silk when I dragged Renoise from the Retina over to the external screen.

That sounds like an interesting perception. Perhaps something in the retina fix that is causing the laggy behavior. Apple themselves advises on how to update fonts and dialogs for the Retina display when stuff is moving or resizing, which is what Taktik likely applied in the last maintenance update for the Retina Macs. (there was some [other fishy behavior](http://forum.renoise.com/index.php?/topic/35473-fixed-281-osx-32bit-improperly-scaled-display-on-retina-displays/page p 276150 hl retina fromsearch 1#entry276150) with the Retina display in Renoise)

I have the same problem as this post too. I occured after sleep today.

I also found out that when I apply the lowest resolution and go back to the highest, it gets slightly better when Renoise is half window size horizontal. Fps shows about 30-35, but when I toggle for full screen, it drops to 10-12 fps and lags.

Today, I’ve got my laptop back from hardware stress-test. No problems of course.

I tested again to be sure and called Apple to follow the case I started. Today there was a release for my machine that was supposed to fix graphic problems, but it did not. Now It even lags on an external cinema display, so It actually got worse.

The Apple guys are confused so I made this video to show the difference. https://www.dropbox.com/s/9af1f59rq1i0euy/2012-12-07%2013.54.55.mov

Here’s one more to show fps drop and small windowed to fullscreen: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ahvbkja40r0zew/2012-12-07%2018.56.22.mov