6 ms·

I bootcamped Windows 10 onto my 2017 i5 iMac the other day so I could play some games. Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU consider

I bootcamped Windows 10 onto my 2017 i5 iMac the other day so I could play some games. Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware. Not ground breaking news, but I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions. All a moot point now with Apple Silicon being the furture! :)

atty 6y ago
I do wonder if they stopped optimizing for Intel once it was clear they were going to release apple CPU based Macs. I don’t have one personally, but I’ve tested a family member’s M1 MacBook Air, and it’s the most responsive laptop I’ve ever used. My 2019 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels... Just fine. And GPU performance for sure is far better under bootcamp. I pretty much exclusively play games in bootcamp, even if there’s a Mac version.
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  I don't think there's that many places in MacOS where they write hand optimised assembly for either architecture. Looking at rust it seems like LLVM is optimising a lot of languages (specially that apple uses). This is platform independent. The M1 is supposedly really fast, but it's not like they optimise userspace for either architecture. Booting is different on the M1, but once the kernel is alive and well it's just RISC vs CISC.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Of course a number of system libraries do get platform-specific optimizations.
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      Sure, but those are usually written in a compiled language that LLVM will pass over anyways, generating optimised code. My point is that this all "mac is optimised for the hardware" "nonsense" is very non-techy. Sure they don't need to worry about drivers the same way, but it's still x86 or arm, people already target these so it's just about whose code and architecture is the better.
- luke2m 6y ago
  That could add to the perceived huge performance gains on the M1.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Most of the engineers are still using Intel Macs, so I doubt it.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware. I put Windows 10 on my old MacBook Pro and was shocked by how much more responsive it felt in Windows than in macOS. I thought the hardware was just too old because it was starting to feel sluggish in macOS, but Windows runs perfectly well on it. Maybe Apple can continue to evolve their hardware fast enough that their software doesn’t need to be as efficient, but share your feelings that we’d all be better off if Apple had made responsiveness a priority.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Sometimes wiping the drive and reinstalling can boost responsiveness on its own.
  - thitcanh 6y ago
    This is true. Most of these comparisons are between a well-used system with a brand-new one. “Of course Firefox feels snappier than Chrome, you haven’t installed your 20 extensions yet.” A so on.
- spideymans 6y ago
  It would be more fair to compare a brand new Windows installation vs a brand new macOS installation. New installations of macOS and Windows always run significantly faster than older installations, in my experience (heck, even new installations of iOS run faster).
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    Windows 10 does boot faster and launches apps faster than Mac OS, on the same hardware. However Mac apps are just as or more responsive and better at running in the background once they've launched. This is my experience.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Now do the same but with OS X 10.9 instead of Windows. It has gotten so much slower...
sokoloff 6y ago
Interesting. Just yesterday, I installed Windows on my son’s i7 iMac as there were several Windows-only apps he wanted to use. Several times he asked “why is this so slow?” I didn’t run any benchmarks yet, but the boot was perceptibly slower and the system felt less responsive, Win 10 vs Catalina.
- asdff 6y ago
  There are oddities with windows on a mac that make it seem like an overall worse experience. The trackpad driver apple supplies is sub par, there is no way to enable tap to click that I can tell at all (much to my chagrin as the artificial trackpad clicking on new macs gives me wrist strain due to having to smush your finger on a flat unmoving piece of glass). Mouse control on windows is also terrible. You set your scroll on a mouse to something like 4 lines or whatever, anything so you aren't just wheeling the thing out trying to get down the page, then you unplug the mouse and the settings carry over to the trackpad and it scrolls at lightspeed. I think in general windows is simply a poorer OS from a ux standpoint too, and the regular users have gotten used to this terrible experience. There is a lot of perceptual lag and hiccups just navigating the system, even on a beefy workstation with 4 cores >3.0ghz each which makes no sense to me. It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay. Not sure how regular windows power users tolerate this OS. It's as clunky as I remember XP being despite the hardware I'm trying these days being way more powerful; 20 years and no ux experience because microsoft knows people and companies will buy it anyway. Software seems in general to be slow to start, and slow to stop, in contrast to mac os, which must strive to be a better user experience if it is to poach customers from microsoft at all. That being said, take a game that's been ported to both systems and run your mac in bootcamp with windows, and its not uncommon to pick up a good 10-20fps at least on games. I'm sure enterprise software especially the adobe suite runs a lot better on macos, because there was more engineering effort optimizing this port. I remember TF2 was most sriking on my 2012 macbook pro. On the mac OS side I was getting like 30-40fps on medium settings. Decent, I guess, for an ancient game. On windows in contrast, I was pushing 90fps, and it looked a lot better. That was the case for every single game I've tried. The hardware drivers for things like CPU, GPU, the meat of the system, are much better on windows because the manufacturers just spend more effort building better drivers for this far larger market. Apple specific-sourced hardware that isn't an intel chip or some discrete GPU, like the trackpad experience, the display experience, how the fan is calibrated, are all subpar entirely on windows because Apple doesn't care to improve the bootcamp drivers. They are known to be supar, and on some Macs, the community even recommends their own drivers to use instead of the bootcamp ones, because Apple doens't care about the bootcamp experience.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Interestingly the only time the fans run up on my Mac Min is when I boot into Windows and run an update. I suspect the Mac is better at throttling to keep it quiet.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  By default Windows uses "Active cooling" policy on devices plugged into a power source.
tomaskafka 6y ago
> I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more I didn't enjoy seeing my Intel macs get perceptually slower and slower with each release, and I'd be very afraid of how unoptimized the MacOS can get now, with a performance headroom Apple bought themselves with M1 :/. Meanwhile my 2014-era Haswell gaming PC with an old 500 MB/s SATA SSD boots Windows 10 in a few seconds (about 4-5 times faster than my M1 Air).
coldtea 6y ago
>I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions. Well, they did several things. One of those was compressed memory at the OS level. Another was a new, more optimized for SSDs, filesystem.
PartiallyTyped 6y ago
I too found bigSur to be really sluggish. I downgraded my 2018 MBP15 to Mojave and it was a night and day difference.

atty 6y ago

I do wonder if they stopped optimizing for Intel once it was clear they were going to release apple CPU based Macs. I don’t have one personally, but I’ve tested a family member’s M1 MacBook Air, and it’s the most responsive laptop I’ve ever used. My 2019 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, feels... Just fine. And GPU performance for sure is far better under bootcamp. I pretty much exclusively play games in bootcamp, even if there’s a Mac version.

carlhjerpe 6y ago
I don't think there's that many places in MacOS where they write hand optimised assembly for either architecture. Looking at rust it seems like LLVM is optimising a lot of languages (specially that apple uses). This is platform independent. The M1 is supposedly really fast, but it's not like they optimise userspace for either architecture. Booting is different on the M1, but once the kernel is alive and well it's just RISC vs CISC.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Of course a number of system libraries do get platform-specific optimizations.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    Sure, but those are usually written in a compiled language that LLVM will pass over anyways, generating optimised code. My point is that this all "mac is optimised for the hardware" "nonsense" is very non-techy. Sure they don't need to worry about drivers the same way, but it's still x86 or arm, people already target these so it's just about whose code and architecture is the better.
luke2m 6y ago
That could add to the perceived huge performance gains on the M1.
saagarjha 6y ago
Most of the engineers are still using Intel Macs, so I doubt it.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> Windows boots faster, feels faster, and benchmarked GPU and CPU considerably faster than macOS on the exact same hardware. I put Windows 10 on my old MacBook Pro and was shocked by how much more responsive it felt in Windows than in macOS. I thought the hardware was just too old because it was starting to feel sluggish in macOS, but Windows runs perfectly well on it. Maybe Apple can continue to evolve their hardware fast enough that their software doesn’t need to be as efficient, but share your feelings that we’d all be better off if Apple had made responsiveness a priority.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Sometimes wiping the drive and reinstalling can boost responsiveness on its own.
- thitcanh 6y ago
  This is true. Most of these comparisons are between a well-used system with a brand-new one. “Of course Firefox feels snappier than Chrome, you haven’t installed your 20 extensions yet.” A so on.
spideymans 6y ago
It would be more fair to compare a brand new Windows installation vs a brand new macOS installation. New installations of macOS and Windows always run significantly faster than older installations, in my experience (heck, even new installations of iOS run faster).
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Windows 10 does boot faster and launches apps faster than Mac OS, on the same hardware. However Mac apps are just as or more responsive and better at running in the background once they've launched. This is my experience.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Now do the same but with OS X 10.9 instead of Windows. It has gotten so much slower...

sokoloff 6y ago

Interesting. Just yesterday, I installed Windows on my son’s i7 iMac as there were several Windows-only apps he wanted to use. Several times he asked “why is this so slow?” I didn’t run any benchmarks yet, but the boot was perceptibly slower and the system felt less responsive, Win 10 vs Catalina.

asdff 6y ago
There are oddities with windows on a mac that make it seem like an overall worse experience. The trackpad driver apple supplies is sub par, there is no way to enable tap to click that I can tell at all (much to my chagrin as the artificial trackpad clicking on new macs gives me wrist strain due to having to smush your finger on a flat unmoving piece of glass). Mouse control on windows is also terrible. You set your scroll on a mouse to something like 4 lines or whatever, anything so you aren't just wheeling the thing out trying to get down the page, then you unplug the mouse and the settings carry over to the trackpad and it scrolls at lightspeed. I think in general windows is simply a poorer OS from a ux standpoint too, and the regular users have gotten used to this terrible experience. There is a lot of perceptual lag and hiccups just navigating the system, even on a beefy workstation with 4 cores >3.0ghz each which makes no sense to me. It makes no sense why windows explorer should even have delays. Why the start menu should have a delay. Not sure how regular windows power users tolerate this OS. It's as clunky as I remember XP being despite the hardware I'm trying these days being way more powerful; 20 years and no ux experience because microsoft knows people and companies will buy it anyway. Software seems in general to be slow to start, and slow to stop, in contrast to mac os, which must strive to be a better user experience if it is to poach customers from microsoft at all. That being said, take a game that's been ported to both systems and run your mac in bootcamp with windows, and its not uncommon to pick up a good 10-20fps at least on games. I'm sure enterprise software especially the adobe suite runs a lot better on macos, because there was more engineering effort optimizing this port. I remember TF2 was most sriking on my 2012 macbook pro. On the mac OS side I was getting like 30-40fps on medium settings. Decent, I guess, for an ancient game. On windows in contrast, I was pushing 90fps, and it looked a lot better. That was the case for every single game I've tried. The hardware drivers for things like CPU, GPU, the meat of the system, are much better on windows because the manufacturers just spend more effort building better drivers for this far larger market. Apple specific-sourced hardware that isn't an intel chip or some discrete GPU, like the trackpad experience, the display experience, how the fan is calibrated, are all subpar entirely on windows because Apple doesn't care to improve the bootcamp drivers. They are known to be supar, and on some Macs, the community even recommends their own drivers to use instead of the bootcamp ones, because Apple doens't care about the bootcamp experience.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

Interestingly the only time the fans run up on my Mac Min is when I boot into Windows and run an update. I suspect the Mac is better at throttling to keep it quiet.

lostmsu 6y ago
By default Windows uses "Active cooling" policy on devices plugged into a power source.

tomaskafka 6y ago

> I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more I didn't enjoy seeing my Intel macs get perceptually slower and slower with each release, and I'd be very afraid of how unoptimized the MacOS can get now, with a performance headroom Apple bought themselves with M1 :/. Meanwhile my 2014-era Haswell gaming PC with an old 500 MB/s SATA SSD boots Windows 10 in a few seconds (about 4-5 times faster than my M1 Air).

coldtea 6y ago

>I do wish Apple had worked on optimising macOS for older hardware more. They claim they do or did, but I never noticed this in the later mountain named versions. Well, they did several things. One of those was compressed memory at the OS level. Another was a new, more optimized for SSDs, filesystem.

PartiallyTyped 6y ago

I too found bigSur to be really sluggish. I downgraded my 2018 MBP15 to Mojave and it was a night and day difference.