5 ms·

> Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, furthe

> Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's remarkable, and it makes me believe in the 12-inch MacBook more than ever before. So much this. I really admire how performance of Windows desktop is optimized. I can't compare it with OS X, but when compared to modern Linux DE's (Plasma, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon etc.), Windows desktop still has all the same modern bells and whistles (hw acceleration, effects etc.) yet it blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption. I say I admire the effort on optimization, because things weren't that good even on Windows 7. I remember constantly having slight stuttering here and there on Windows 7 but Windows 8+ is completely smooth on the very same machine (which is now getting close to its 6th year), and this anectode shows that they must have taken the optimization seriously. P.S: I'm not complaining on Linux DE's, they just have different priorities, and they're good deals considering their price.

dhimes 11y ago
I have to confess as well. My 8.1 machine is the first windows in 10 years I haven't either completely wiped or dual booted. I live in linux, but now use virtualbox on this machine. I bought it to be a travel rig- my main development is still done on a dual-boot (that now never boots into windows), but I'm liking it. I wish the virtualization was a bit smoother but it serves my purposes for now. I just like the win 8.1 experience enough that I don't want to deny myself easy access to it.
carlosrg 11y ago
Have you tried the propietary graphics drivers in Linux? They improve things a lot. I'm using the Nvidia ones because Nouveau performance was very poor (not their fault, Nvidia is not very open to release specifications or code so they have to reverse engineer them) and everything is very smooth. And the battery life much better than Windows.
- kasabali 11y ago
  I'm already using proprietary Nvidia drivers but it doesn't seem to positively affect desktop performance that much on my machine (it's an old 2xxm card). I must say I'm happy with Kwin performance, it's just that Windows is much more smooth and uses somewhat less resources while doing that.
josteink 11y ago
> compared to modern Linux DE's ... it (Windows) blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption. I'm not going to debate this, but I'll just try to assign blame. It goes one place: X. As long as they all build on X, things will be suboptimal and I can't wait for initiatives and projects like Wayland and Mir gain more traction. If you doubt anything I say about X, please watch this youtube video which has one of the key X-maintainers complain about how bad it really is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PFjoYuml0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PFjoYuml0
xyby 11y ago
Hmm.. what do I have to do to experience those performance problems? I use Mint and Debian on my machines and I never have any problems. Nothing ever stutters or lags or whatever. I mainly use Firefox, the Terminal, Gimp and Libre Office. No performance problems whatsoever. And I have pretty old machines. An over 5 years old lenovo laptop and a similarely old desktop machine.
- ksk 11y ago
  Why would you ever want to experience performance problems? The obvious answer to experience those problems is to setup your system the same way as the people experiencing the problems, same h/w, s/w config, etc. You can look at the configs of people reporting problems on forums, in bug reports, etc.
sheng 11y ago
I know what you mean and the amusing thing is that it used to be the other way around. Back then in the older days of Gnome2 and KDE3 it was possible to use them with other window managers like Beryl and Compiz. These again also provided a 3D desktop experience and in their later development stage they were well optimized and stable. They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support. Beryl and Compiz? I beg to differ. Besides a bitch to get running, and get running well, they were not at all comparable to Vista with regards to "resource consumption" and "hardware support".
  - captainmuon 11y ago
    This is just an anecdote, but I share the parent's experience, too. I bought a low-end HP laptop around when Vista came out (2006/07?). It ran with Aero Glass, but not very smoothly. But first compiz-quinn and then beryl worked perfectly, also with the same blurred transparency effect that was slow on Windows. Even when I enabled the crazier effects like wobbly windows, it remained smooth, and used not noticably more resources. The only place a slowness was noticable was when quickly scrolling (webpages, for instance). However, this is still a problem on any non-Windows compositing DE in my experience. At some point, "they" started to rewrite compiz, and it went downhill, until it was so slow I could not use compositing anymore.
    - dmethvin 11y ago
      On the Windows side, there was a lot of tense discussion between Intel and Microsoft regarding Intel's popular integrated-graphics chipset being shipped at the time of Vista's release. The chipset didn't have hardware DirectX support and shouldn't have been certified, but Intel had promised their customers (like HP) the chipsets were fine and they were not anywhere near the end of the product lifecycles for either the chipset or the PCs. So Microsoft fudged the rules and a bunch of consumer-grade hardware ran like crap on Vista.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Synaesthesia 11y ago
Yeah the OS X UI smoothness is great if the GPU is up to the task, like on my iMac it's flawless but in the case of this Macbook it's Intel Integrated graphics on a Retina display, and in my experience that can be less than flawlessly smooth in operations like Mission Control/Expose for sure, so it seems Apple has some catching up to do now. I also find Windows runs very well on low specced computers. Safari on Mac OS is extremely smooth, from the looks of this blog it seems Microsoft has replicated that in Edge browser. Look forward to trying it.
- izacus 11y ago
  My 15" retina Macbook with nVidia graphics can't get 60fps on yosemite either.
Aleman360 11y ago
And guess what... We're using the same tools available to third party app developers, in an effort to ensure the dev platform is rock solid. The Start menu is just a universal XAML app. We don't have to do any special optimization on top of what the framework offers. Disclaimer: Microsoft employee working on the Windows 10 Start menu.
- AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
  You guys have knocked it out of the park with the start menu. It's wonderful. Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. I really like that you guys have downgraded the size a bit since earlier builds; really sleek and useful now.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    > Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. Sigh.
    - sathyabhat 11y ago
      You're talking about pre-release software.
      - farawayea 11y ago
        Cool story. Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 have similar problems. Windows 7 becomes slow with huge uptime. Windows 8.1 has countless bugs.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- nimish 11y ago
  Well it does help that you can just email the perf people in devdiv and have the single largest concentration of low level windows performance experts available for free The start menu is great code but mom and pop dev shop doesn't have hundreds of top devs available :)
emp_zealoth 11y ago
Well, I'm using Ubuntu/Gnome 3 on both my 6 year old gaming desktop and 4 years old i3/basic discrete AMD GPU laptop and I have to say everything runs extremely smooth and consumes a pittance less than 1GB RAM used with some stuff in the background
- kasabali 11y ago
  Gnome shell is CPU hungry and I can tell I'm not alone with that because I did a lot of google search on it. Even when dragging windows around, CPU usage skyrockets to 40-60% and it's not even smooth. And that's with gpu acceleration, I can't even imagine what would've happened if it were on software rendering. Not to mention memory usage of gnome shell only increases with time. They are all known issues but shell developers blame proprietary Nvidia driver, maybe that's why you are more happy with gnome shell than I am :) (Though I still can't get how cpu usage skyrockets when dragging windows.)
  - madez 11y ago
    I'm using Gnome shell and just tested what happens to the CPU usage when I drag around windows. The dragging itself was buttery smooth and gnome-shell never used more than 12.6% of one core. I'm using the libre radeonsi driver.
    - kasabali 11y ago
      It's because of either different drivers, or your one core is faster than my poor little c2d core, or you're not moving it crazy enough :) Did you compare it with kwin? For example, on my machine gnome shell uses sth. like 40-60% while kwin is 10% at most.
      - madez 11y ago
        I'm using a 4670K, so there is a difference, but I doubt that this is the explaining factor. I know that gnome successfully offloads work to the GPU when I drag the windows [1] because I can hear it [2]. I don't have kwin installed, so I didn't compare. [1] Yes, I also did move them wildly, too. [2] My graphic cards has serious coil whine issues.

dhimes 11y ago

I have to confess as well. My 8.1 machine is the first windows in 10 years I haven't either completely wiped or dual booted. I live in linux, but now use virtualbox on this machine. I bought it to be a travel rig- my main development is still done on a dual-boot (that now never boots into windows), but I'm liking it. I wish the virtualization was a bit smoother but it serves my purposes for now. I just like the win 8.1 experience enough that I don't want to deny myself easy access to it.

carlosrg 11y ago

Have you tried the propietary graphics drivers in Linux? They improve things a lot. I'm using the Nvidia ones because Nouveau performance was very poor (not their fault, Nvidia is not very open to release specifications or code so they have to reverse engineer them) and everything is very smooth. And the battery life much better than Windows.

kasabali 11y ago
I'm already using proprietary Nvidia drivers but it doesn't seem to positively affect desktop performance that much on my machine (it's an old 2xxm card). I must say I'm happy with Kwin performance, it's just that Windows is much more smooth and uses somewhat less resources while doing that.

josteink 11y ago

> compared to modern Linux DE's ... it (Windows) blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption. I'm not going to debate this, but I'll just try to assign blame. It goes one place: X. As long as they all build on X, things will be suboptimal and I can't wait for initiatives and projects like Wayland and Mir gain more traction. If you doubt anything I say about X, please watch this youtube video which has one of the key X-maintainers complain about how bad it really is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PFjoYuml0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PFjoYuml0

xyby 11y ago

Hmm.. what do I have to do to experience those performance problems? I use Mint and Debian on my machines and I never have any problems. Nothing ever stutters or lags or whatever. I mainly use Firefox, the Terminal, Gimp and Libre Office. No performance problems whatsoever. And I have pretty old machines. An over 5 years old lenovo laptop and a similarely old desktop machine.

ksk 11y ago
Why would you ever want to experience performance problems? The obvious answer to experience those problems is to setup your system the same way as the people experiencing the problems, same h/w, s/w config, etc. You can look at the configs of people reporting problems on forums, in bug reports, etc.

sheng 11y ago

I know what you mean and the amusing thing is that it used to be the other way around. Back then in the older days of Gnome2 and KDE3 it was possible to use them with other window managers like Beryl and Compiz. These again also provided a 3D desktop experience and in their later development stage they were well optimized and stable. They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support.

coldtea 11y ago
>They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support. Beryl and Compiz? I beg to differ. Besides a bitch to get running, and get running well, they were not at all comparable to Vista with regards to "resource consumption" and "hardware support".
- captainmuon 11y ago
  This is just an anecdote, but I share the parent's experience, too. I bought a low-end HP laptop around when Vista came out (2006/07?). It ran with Aero Glass, but not very smoothly. But first compiz-quinn and then beryl worked perfectly, also with the same blurred transparency effect that was slow on Windows. Even when I enabled the crazier effects like wobbly windows, it remained smooth, and used not noticably more resources. The only place a slowness was noticable was when quickly scrolling (webpages, for instance). However, this is still a problem on any non-Windows compositing DE in my experience. At some point, "they" started to rewrite compiz, and it went downhill, until it was so slow I could not use compositing anymore.
  - dmethvin 11y ago
    On the Windows side, there was a lot of tense discussion between Intel and Microsoft regarding Intel's popular integrated-graphics chipset being shipped at the time of Vista's release. The chipset didn't have hardware DirectX support and shouldn't have been certified, but Intel had promised their customers (like HP) the chipsets were fine and they were not anywhere near the end of the product lifecycles for either the chipset or the PCs. So Microsoft fudged the rules and a bunch of consumer-grade hardware ran like crap on Vista.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Synaesthesia 11y ago

Yeah the OS X UI smoothness is great if the GPU is up to the task, like on my iMac it's flawless but in the case of this Macbook it's Intel Integrated graphics on a Retina display, and in my experience that can be less than flawlessly smooth in operations like Mission Control/Expose for sure, so it seems Apple has some catching up to do now. I also find Windows runs very well on low specced computers. Safari on Mac OS is extremely smooth, from the looks of this blog it seems Microsoft has replicated that in Edge browser. Look forward to trying it.

izacus 11y ago
My 15" retina Macbook with nVidia graphics can't get 60fps on yosemite either.

Aleman360 11y ago

And guess what... We're using the same tools available to third party app developers, in an effort to ensure the dev platform is rock solid. The Start menu is just a universal XAML app. We don't have to do any special optimization on top of what the framework offers. Disclaimer: Microsoft employee working on the Windows 10 Start menu.

AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
You guys have knocked it out of the park with the start menu. It's wonderful. Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. I really like that you guys have downgraded the size a bit since earlier builds; really sleek and useful now.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  > Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. Sigh.
  - sathyabhat 11y ago
    You're talking about pre-release software.
    - farawayea 11y ago
      Cool story. Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 have similar problems. Windows 7 becomes slow with huge uptime. Windows 8.1 has countless bugs.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
nimish 11y ago
Well it does help that you can just email the perf people in devdiv and have the single largest concentration of low level windows performance experts available for free The start menu is great code but mom and pop dev shop doesn't have hundreds of top devs available :)

emp_zealoth 11y ago

Well, I'm using Ubuntu/Gnome 3 on both my 6 year old gaming desktop and 4 years old i3/basic discrete AMD GPU laptop and I have to say everything runs extremely smooth and consumes a pittance less than 1GB RAM used with some stuff in the background

kasabali 11y ago
Gnome shell is CPU hungry and I can tell I'm not alone with that because I did a lot of google search on it. Even when dragging windows around, CPU usage skyrockets to 40-60% and it's not even smooth. And that's with gpu acceleration, I can't even imagine what would've happened if it were on software rendering. Not to mention memory usage of gnome shell only increases with time. They are all known issues but shell developers blame proprietary Nvidia driver, maybe that's why you are more happy with gnome shell than I am :) (Though I still can't get how cpu usage skyrockets when dragging windows.)
- madez 11y ago
  I'm using Gnome shell and just tested what happens to the CPU usage when I drag around windows. The dragging itself was buttery smooth and gnome-shell never used more than 12.6% of one core. I'm using the libre radeonsi driver.
  - kasabali 11y ago
    It's because of either different drivers, or your one core is faster than my poor little c2d core, or you're not moving it crazy enough :) Did you compare it with kwin? For example, on my machine gnome shell uses sth. like 40-60% while kwin is 10% at most.
    - madez 11y ago
      I'm using a 4670K, so there is a difference, but I doubt that this is the explaining factor. I know that gnome successfully offloads work to the GPU when I drag the windows [1] because I can hear it [2]. I don't have kwin installed, so I didn't compare. [1] Yes, I also did move them wildly, too. [2] My graphic cards has serious coil whine issues.