Dear All,
I have a simple scene with some (non-transparent) cubes:
While this motion was relatively fluent (10-20 fps I estimate) in version 10.1, 10.2, 10.3., 10.3.1, it is roughly 0.3 fps for me in version 10.4. Can someone else confirm this behavior? I’ve tried some of the different rendering engines to no avail.
I’ve attached the notebook. I’m working on El Capitan with a Macbook pro Retina.
I can confirm this. I am also on OS X 10.11.3, late 2014 MacBook Pro retina.
The performance problem also affects the large mesh regions that I am working with at the moment. Example attached.
Your brain is still a bit moveable at 2-3 fps, but i would expect for my simple cubes, it should be able to do at couple hundred fps? (If i can imagine games like farcry or battlefield with many many polygons and physics computations run at 50-100Hz…)
I’m not sure what has caused this…
I assume you are talking about interactively dragging the Graphics3D object (rotating, etc.). I’m running 10.4 on Win 10. I don’t see any slow down when dragging the cubes.
Yes indeed rotating it around in 3D is indeed unbearably slow (update every couple seconds)! Thanks for taking the time! It might be a Mac only thing…
Sander, we’re looking into the problem and we can reproduce this in-house.
10.4 has a significantly overhauled OpenGL implementation which we expect will improve both the speed and quality of 3D graphics in upcoming releases. If there is a fix for this specific issue, we will work towards providing you and other customers an updated version.
In the mean time, please do provide the output from SystemInformation[“Devices”]
Thank you for reporting this issue.
I have attached a notebook with the command you said. I was also wondering what happened to the prerelease program, I think these are definitely things that could have been avoided or at least known before release. I would consider myself quite an extensive user (used it nearly half of my life) that use a lot of different domains of Mathematica and I think that prereleases would be great for the both of us (us playing around with new stuff, and you getting valuable reports in like the one above). I know @Szabolcs Horvat (another ‘advanced user’) also would like to see the prerelease coming back in order check compatibility of packages prior to a new release (something that is crucial for him and actually for the entire community that can’t wait for all the packages made by others to be updated to support the new versions). Is there any such plan? You already have a mechanism in place that me and others used and it worked great! I don’t see many downside, apart from perhaps a bit of bandwidth on your side…
Thanks for looking in to this, 3D graphics is at its very core and of course crucial for everyone, fortunately it seems the windows users (the majority of users I guess) are safe…
Also fast on Win 7, the cubes move around as fast as I can move the mouse.
Also fast on Win 7, the cubes move around as fast as I can move the mouse.
Hi everyone,
I have tried this out on many different Macs now. I the latest, very highest spec MacBook Pro Retinas it works ok-ish (much worse than on 10.3.1 though), but on a highest spec MacBook the graphic takes 4 seconds or so to update. The MacBook has no issues on 10.3.1 at all with that graphic.
Cheers,
Marco
Perhaps, you could share also SystemInformation[“Devices”] ? I’m not sure if the operating system might be important though…
They are all on the latest version of El Capitan.
Ok, so all the slow ones are Macs with El Capitan… well, unlucky us 
I’m very hopeful a solution will come soon.
I a bit too lazy to run this on all university machines and generate the report for all the laptops again, but the issue is universal on all of the machines.
Cheers,
Marco
PS:I’ll add one or so more SystemReports to this.
Also cool: On the higher MacbookPro Retina (Mid2014, 3GHz i7,16GB, Intel Iris 1536 MB) this rotates substantially worse than on the MacBooPro (Mid 2012, 2.9Ghz i7, 8GB, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB).
M.
So you’re saying less is more… hmmm
I btw have the mid 2012 macbook pro retina (the very first retina notebook that came out).
Yes, I have noticed that on several occasions. It is occasionally very difficult for me to predict on which machine (including MacPros and iMacs and even Linux Clusters) Mathematica is faster; the specs do not seem to be very predictive. I also work for a company on a Windows server (no way around it) and have a variety of toy Windows machines for connected devices projects; a direct comparison between all of these machines sometimes is surprising, but I have not studied this systematically.
On one occasion my high spec MacBook Pro Retina was outrun by a really old low-spec student PC on linux. I did not report it at the time, but was quite annoyed at my MacBookPro…
Cheers,
M.
I’ve never seen any negative correlation between pc speed and performance yet, so very interesting that this can happen!
There is an edge/line drawing bug found which only happens on Retina (Mac) machines. It might cause 4 or 5 times slowness for some examples. We are expecting to have a fix soon.
Hi Yuzhu Lu, great to hear you tracked down the issue!
Is it also related to this line-drawing bug (from here )
or is this simply z-fighting?
