[macintologist]

I'm really disappointed with Apple not fully utilizing Quartz Extreme for scrolling. When I surf the web on a 1ghz Celeron PC in WinXP in Internet Explorer, the scrolling (from the mouse scroll wheel) is really smooth and nice. And it goes down at just the right speed.

In Panther you can adjust the speed and I find the mouse scrolling to be OK, but when I turn on smooth scrolling it's just horrible! There's a half second delay before it actually starts scrolling and it's not even smooth.

Is this not the case on a 2ghz g5?

[Detrius]

What are the specs of your machine?

[wataru]

I don't think QE has much to do with scrolling.

[rhogue islander]

It seems pretty smooth with a MS Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 and Intellipoint v5.

Window resizing is still rather choppy, but it keeps getting better.

[bmedina]

Scrolling is limited by the speed with which your CPU can draw the new content that is being uncovered. This has nothing to do with Quartz Extreme, but yes, it is slower than Windows.

[RooneyX]

All these new technologies aren't supposed to make scrolling faster. ****, I'm getting text input lag just typing this.

[Don Pickett]

Scrolling is just fine on a 500 MHz G3.

[Terri]

Scrolling is just fine and plenty fast on my 17" Powerbook. Window resizing is also smooth and fast. I think you must have an older machine and/or not enough RAM.

[Developer]

Originally posted by Terri:
Scrolling is just fine and plenty fast on my 17" Powerbook. Window resizing is also smooth and fast. I think you must have an older machine and/or not enough RAM.

Scrolling has nothing to do with RAM. He was talking about "Smooth Scrolling" which you have turned off, so you can't comment on the matter.

[barbarian]

I have many macs including a G5. I also have a bunch of PCs. Scrolling is one place where PCs kick butt. Even a humble celeron offers smoother scrolling (especially horiz scrolling) than a G5. Obviously the Mac has lots going on graphically with compositing and all, but this is one area where the mac still falls behind. I send feedback about it whenever it starts to bug me. You should too.

[Terri]

Originally posted by Developer:
Scrolling has nothing to do with RAM. He was talking about "Smooth Scrolling" which you have turned off, so you can't comment on the matter.

Wow looks like it is on to me.

http://cleocrap.com/prefs.jpgtooki says: NO HUGE INLINE IMAGES!!!!!


Too little RAM will make the machine run slow, including scrolling.

[Developer]

Mozilla/Netscape does not honor the smooth scrolling setting in System Preferences.

So as I said, you can't comment on the matter if you're not using the feature.

[Terri]

Originally posted by Developer:
Mozilla/Netscape does not honor the smooth scrolling setting in System Preferences.

So as I said, you can't comment on the matter if you're not using the feature.

OK then pick one of the apps that I use each day. Scrolling seems to work just fine in all of these.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

i choose post its. scroll that!

[Developer]

Originally posted by Terri:
OK then pick one of the apps that I use each day. Scrolling seems to work just fine in all of these.
<Dock>

I don't know the apps with the clipboard and X1 icons, but from the others none uses smooth scrolling with the exception of Mail. And Mail usually has to display only one or two pages of plain text, so that's hardly taxing.

You're using Mozilla, so type:

about:config

into the URL field. Then control click into the table and select New->Boolean pref with the name

general.smoothScroll

and the value

true

Now scroll a long page with the space bar or the page up/down keys (doesn't appear to work with the scrollbar) and report how it works on your machine.

[Terri]

Originally posted by Apple Pro Underwear:
i choose post its. scroll that!

Using my scroll wheel mouse even that scrolls well.

[CJM]

this is one of those things that's completely relative. Sure, you think what you've got is fine until you try something that is better.

I have a DP 1.25 and a P4-2.4ghz hooked up to a 23" cinema display with a KVM switch. I can swap back and forth instantly and scrolling and window resizing (ESPECIALLY window resizing) is FAR better on the PC. it's probably the thing i dislike most about OS X.

[Catfish_Man]

QE has little/nothing to do with scrolling speed. Window moving speed it would help with, but that's not the problem. I suppose QE might help draw icons a bit faster, since that's a compositing operation (in Cocoa, anyway, I don't know about PowerPlant for the Finder), but that's about it. One of several reasons Windows is faster at things like this is because instead of drawing going like this:

program -> buffer -> graphics card

it goes like this

program -> graphics card

OS9 did this too. It results in some pretty nasty tearing sometimes (My Win2k box at school is awful that way, but it's kinda slow), but it is fast.

[Brass]

Nothing cam compete with a Commodore 64 for smooth scrolling. I remember how completely amazingly smooth the graphics slid by when playing Uridium. That Andrew Baybrook was a genius with the C64!

[Zimphire]

My 1.25ghz G4 scrolls smoother than my parents 1ghz XP box.

[TheTraveller]

Yeah, I have to weigh in here on the side of "OS X Scrolling & Window Resizing sucks." Whoever said that it's their least favorite thing about OS X - I whole-heartedly second that!

[MDA]

Originally posted by CJM:
this is one of those things that's completely relative. Sure, you think what you've got is fine until you try something that is better.

I have a DP 1.25 and a P4-2.4ghz hooked up to a 23" cinema display with a KVM switch. I can swap back and forth instantly and scrolling and window resizing (ESPECIALLY window resizing) is FAR better on the PC. it's probably the thing i dislike most about OS X.

I think it's important to remember that XP isn't doing anywhere near the complicated graphic rendering that OS X is. The superior look of OS X does take it's toll on performance. You can fault Jobs for putting all of the eye candy into OS X.

MDA

[[APi]TheMan]

Heh.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
QE has little/nothing to do with scrolling speed. Window moving speed it would help with, but that's not the problem. I suppose QE might help draw icons a bit faster, since that's a compositing operation (in Cocoa, anyway, I don't know about PowerPlant for the Finder), but that's about it. One of several reasons Windows is faster at things like this is because instead of drawing going like this:

program -> buffer -> graphics card

it goes like this

program -> graphics card

OS9 did this too. It results in some pretty nasty tearing sometimes (My Win2k box at school is awful that way, but it's kinda slow), but it is fast.

Thanks for the explaination

Now I understand better why OS X is slower than XP. It is a question of quality over speed.

[sniffer]

Yep, it seems like everything you do in Aqua is all real time. That's all nice, but I wish they could make a few more short cuts for the elder machines at least. Like outlined resizing of the windows etc. Let the scroll bar follow the mouse instead of the page, and if it can't keep up with the scrolling, drop a few redraws instead. Just make things appear fast, that's all. XP use a lots of tricks to make it appear fast. Like for instance if you turn on media players visual effects and hide media player behind a window, it stops redrawing everything behind the window instantly and thus saving a lot of CPU cycles. (Perhaps that's just the nature of the way XP draws the windows, but point is, XP have its share of short cuts)

[Millennium]

Originally posted by macintologist:
I'm really disappointed with Apple not fully utilizing Quartz Extreme for scrolling. When I surf the web on a 1ghz Celeron PC in WinXP in Internet Explorer, the scrolling (from the mouse scroll wheel) is really smooth and nice. And it goes down at just the right speed.

In Panther you can adjust the speed and I find the mouse scrolling to be OK, but when I turn on smooth scrolling it's just horrible! There's a half second delay before it actually starts scrolling and it's not even smooth.

Is this not the case on a 2ghz g5?

What are you using as the basis for comparison?

Seriously. One, QE has noting whatsoever to do with scrolling (it could in future releases, but currently it does not). Two, given that when you test smooth scrolling in IE/Windows, pretty much everything you're using has been put directly into the OS kernel by Microsoft, so of course it's going to be faster. That speed comes at the direct expense of stability and (potentially) security.

I, for one, would rather see Apple do it right than do it first.

[Gul Banana]

Smooth scrolling shouldn't be hard, even with fancy Quartz effects
All you have to do is have the scrollview render _all_ content initially (most of it offscreen, and that which is in a background thread so that the user-visible content is prioritized) blat the whole thing to the graphics card as a bitmap or texture and use the 2d acceleration APIs (for bitmaps) or Quartz Extreme/OpenGL (for a texture). It'd use even MORE RAM than OS X does now, but it would be every bit as fast and smooth as Windows.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Smooth scrolling shouldn't be hard, even with fancy Quartz effects
All you have to do is have the scrollview render _all_ content initially (most of it offscreen, and that which is in a background thread so that the user-visible content is prioritized) blat the whole thing to the graphics card as a bitmap or texture and use the 2d acceleration APIs (for bitmaps) or Quartz Extreme/OpenGL (for a texture). It'd use even MORE RAM than OS X does now, but it would be every bit as fast and smooth as Windows.

Do you mean RAM on the graphics card, the main RAM or both?

And how much RAM -- is this doable?

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
I suppose QE might help draw icons a bit faster, since that's a compositing operation

No. QE works at the window level, not the content level. Maybe a future version will accelerate content drawing operations (Panther made some progress in this area with CGGLContexts allowing Quartz content to be drawn directly to an OpenGL surface, but applications have to specifically code for this.)

As you said, the big difference between OS X and others is that everything is double buffered, there is a big speed/memory cost inherent in this.

There are some other factors too; ideally the final copy from the offscreen buffer to the framebuffer is VBL-synced to avoid tearing. This is supposed to make i.e. dragging a window or scrolling tear-free, but it is currently badly broken in Panther with some ATI hardware. Worked great in 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2.0 through 10.2.2.

Also there is the event latency of the mouse or keyboard. If you are trying to scroll window content down every time you press the arrow key, a very simple limiting factor is the repeat speed of the keyboard. If you go to the control panel and play with the settings, you'll see that the maximum repeat speed is still short of typical monitor refresh rate (i.e. 60Hz minimum.) Similarly with the mouse scroll wheel.

Smooth scrolling ought to fix this by triggering a micro-scroll event once per VBL, but in the current incarnation it appears to run at 30Hz. So the motion is half as smooth as Windows right off the bat. Add the VBL tearing and it looks pretty bad.

Any Mac newer than, say, an iMac DV, is easily capable of scrolling the entire display at 60Hz perfectly smoothly (I myself have coded it. Older ones probably can, but I can't say for sure.) The window manager adds some overhead but not terribly so. Drawing the newly exposed content is a much bigger hit, especially if applications are poorly coded to redraw the entire window content each time. The real problem (it seems to me) are some bugs (VBL) and arbitrary limits (repeat speed, timer rates) elsewhere in the system.

[KidRed]

I think a lot here are missing the main reason, Windows scrolls smoothly and macs don't because macs scroll one line at a time. The end result is a notchy feeling when you scroll. Even with smooth scrolling turned on, it's just a smoother notchy type scrolling. Windows doesn't notch, it glides, maybe it scrolls by half a line at a time or something. Nothing to do with ram or CPU or age of your machine, it's the way macs work.

I've always wondered and wished macs scrolled like windows, and at least now we have smooth scrolling to make it closer.

[Devin Lane]

Hey all

Basically Catfish_Man had it right when he explained the buffer thing.

Basically, when you have a windows box with a high-frequency processor, (think 1.5GHz, maybe less), it can draw the text and other scrolling data at a high rate, and even though it doesn't appear to flicker, that is because the processor is drawing it soooo often. Think like 200+x/s. However, lower the clock speed of that windows box, and you get to experience some laaaaaaaaaag.

OS X's scrolling, on the other hand, is composited first, so it *doesn't* flicker. Ever. That is why it looks higher quality, but suffers in terms of speed. Another important consideration is the speed of text rendering. In un-Anti-alias mode, my computer can draw something like 200000 kchars/s. Using Quartz antialiasing, it goes down to something like 1000 kchars/s. About 20000x slower, at the price of (in my opinion) better-looking text.

A friend of mine installed linux on his G4 (same machine as mine), set the res to max (1600x1200), loaded a complex page, and could not get scrolling to lag at all. Why? No compositing, and no AA. Its that simple folks.

[bernardb]

Unfortunately I have to agree with the original poster. I have a Dell piece of crap at work with a 2.4GHZ PIV, WinXP Pro and INTEGRAGTED INTEL GRAPHICS....what I would call a really cheapo machine...BUT, the scrolling in IE is superior. It is smoother, just the right speed, and the ability to wheel-click and enable fast scroll is a great feature.

But this is the only thing it does better than my G5, and it looks like a piece of junk...cheap plastic and a goofy swing open side door on the computer (another obvious theft from Apple). And also, with all the eye candy enabled to get as close to my OS10.3.2's appearence as possible with WinXP, there is a noticeable delay between clicking on menus and the menu actually opening.....so I still think overall we are way ahead of M$ even as they are scrambling to steal as much as possible to put into Longhorn...

(BTW - my system: Dual 2.0 G5, 4GB PC3200, 9800Pro, 23" HD, (3)160GB SATA, 10.3.2)

[iPond317]

Okay, I'm not running CPU intensive stuff on my TiBook 400 but when I play anything through iTunes 4.2 scrolling is severely affected. Especially in Safari. I'm on 10.3.2 (which is buggy as it is) with all the latest updates.

TiBook 400
512MB
10GB
10.3.2

[voodoo]

Originally posted by bernardb:
Unfortunately I have to agree with the original poster. I have a Dell piece of crap at work with a 2.4GHZ PIV, WinXP Pro and INTEGRAGTED INTEL GRAPHICS....what I would call a really cheapo machine...BUT, the scrolling in IE is superior. It is smoother, just the right speed, and the ability to wheel-click and enable fast scroll is a great feature.

But this is the only thing it does better than my G5, and it looks like a piece of junk...cheap plastic and a goofy swing open side door on the computer (another obvious theft from Apple). And also, with all the eye candy enabled to get as close to my OS10.3.2's appearence as possible with WinXP, there is a noticeable delay between clicking on menus and the menu actually opening.....so I still think overall we are way ahead of M$ even as they are scrambling to steal as much as possible to put into Longhorn...

(BTW - my system: Dual 2.0 G5, 4GB PC3200, 9800Pro, 23" HD, (3)160GB SATA, 10.3.2)

Funny, I have a 600 MHz iBook with 8MByte Rage 128 and I'd say there is just a barely noticeable delay from the time I click a menu and when it opens. You have a fantastically more powerful machine and yet you describe it the same way...? Perhaps that teensie delay is programmed into the system

[ambush]

Well one fact is that (if you leave those explanations behind, the FACT still is TRUE)

this eMac700 with 640 mb of ram is slow at scrolling pages.

Slower than the PII 400 / 64mb ram we use at school.

Why would I lie?

[Telusman]

I've read all the posts in this thread, but i can't really understand what anyone is talking about.... my Powerbook G4 667 smoothly scrolls through 99% of context on my computer and it's just as good if not better than a Windows box.... or at least i think it is, i use Windows all day at work, so im just confused as to what people think the difference is. I get no choppyness in scrolling or dropped frames as it were. Maybe im just not seeing what your seeing, but the only machine in my house that has scrolling issues is my iMac DV 400....

The only issue i have lately is with Safari 1.2, Text lag is back with a vengence if your page is displaying animated graphics while typing in a text box.... For thos experiencing lag, scroll up just so u cant see the animated emot-icons and your lag will disappear.



- Telusman.

[Bi@tch]

Originally posted by Telusman:
I've read all the posts in this thread, but i can't really understand what anyone is talking about.... my Powerbook G4 667 smoothly scrolls through 99% of context on my computer and it's just as good if not better than a Windows box.... or at least i think it is, i use Windows all day at work, so im just confused as to what people think the difference is. I get no choppyness in scrolling or dropped frames as it were. Maybe im just not seeing what your seeing, but the only machine in my house that has scrolling issues is my iMac DV 400....

The only issue i have lately is with Safari 1.2, Text lag is back with a vengence if your page is displaying animated graphics while typing in a text box.... For thos experiencing lag, scroll up just so u cant see the animated emot-icons and your lag will disappear.



- Telusman.

When they say smooth, I think they're talking about the frame rate which is displayed in the window while it's scrolling.

I have to agree. It is slower on my 1.8Ghz than on a 1Ghz PC. I think it's an issue with Quartz that should be resolved whatever the cause may be. It's time for Apple to get off their asses and start chumping some code.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by Telusman:

The only issue i have lately is with Safari 1.2, Text lag is back with a vengence if your page is displaying animated graphics while typing in a text box.... For thos experiencing lag, scroll up just so u cant see the animated emot-icons and your lag will disappear.

Get PithHelmet and turn them off !!! Or set them to play once. Between the animated GIFs here at MacNN and the Flash stuff at Ars, the CPU goes crazy when displaying them.

[GeneShifter]

Scrolling is good on all apps that I have...as long as I do not have mathematica or itunes running. If either one or both is running, things get choppy, and not just scrolling.

I have 12"PB with 256MB RAM, so I'm thinking of upgrading the RAM. By all accounts, this is what will fix the problem. You have to remember that OS X is a friggin' RAM hog and much different from Windows. I have an AthlonXP 2000+ machine I built and it is comparable in scrolling to my PB which is only 867 MHz, so I suggest you, too, go get more RAM. This will be good for me because I have fallen in live with Expose , so I have multiple apps open simultaneously all the time.

Anyway, yeah things are slower than they were in OS 9, but who cares? With Panther, I'm finally back to pretty clsoe the speed of 9 and OS X has many other benefits over 9 that I just cannot complain that much. Happy computing.

[ryju]

I have a 400MHz iMac DV with 1GB RAM and scrolling in Safari is most usually laggy. My 350MHz P2 PC does it faster, and it has 384MB RAM.

I'm alittle confused... but I guess a faster Mac is in order.

[GeneShifter]

Originally posted by ryju:
I have a 400MHz iMac DV with 1GB RAM and scrolling in Safari is most usually laggy. My 350MHz P2 PC does it faster, and it has 384MB RAM.

I'm alittle confused... but I guess a faster Mac is in order.

Hmm, that's not good news. That might be due to your low CPU speed because Safari is no problem on my PB 12" with 256MB RAM.

I wonder when Apple is going to get it right. The one gripe I have (that I should have mentioned earlier) is window resizing. This really does suck in OS X. It's an embarassment.

[entrox]

Originally posted by voodoo:
Do you mean RAM on the graphics card, the main RAM or both?

And how much RAM -- is this doable?

Textures are stored in main memory and need to be uploaded to the graphics card first. So you can think of the texture memory as some kind of cache: each time you want to draw a poly, the texture must be already on the card (otherwise it needs to be fetched from main memory - this is why you need a fast bus like AGP).

So let's do a very rough estimate: With the window maximised, this thread is about ten pages long. If I subtract the menu- and scroll bars, the visible area is about 1200x1000 pixels large. This means we need 10 * 1200 * 1000 * 32 Bits to store a texture (or more accurately: several textures, since my NV25 can't handle textures larger than 4096x4096), which is roughly 46 MB for a single window. You can of course use texture compression, but since the texture needs to be updated each time a single pixel changes, this would strain the CPU in addition to saturating the bus. This estimate also disregards any size restrictions the graphics card might have e.g. power-of-two textures, which also lead to an increase in memory usage.

So no, simply drawing everything into huge textures is not exactly a viable strategy.

[MindFad]

No, scrolling isn't affected by QE in any way.

I always bitched that they needed to work on scrolling. Comparable to Windows, it's slower in every instance. Scrolling web pages, especially�though it is fastest in Safari. Forget it for other browsers (that don't use the WebKit). Text, no problem. Nothing compared to OS 9. Jaguar almost doubled scrolling speed from 10.1 and below, and I was hoping Panther would improve even more. Dual 800 here, and I don't want a G5 to have smooth scrolling. Though it doesn't exactly kill me as it is now�I don't scroll all day. Something Apple could maybe work on? We'll see.

[Krypton]

I've always been bothered by the slow scrolling speed of Mac OS X, so I'm going to file a bug report on ADC bugs. It should be interesting to see whether they close it as a non issue.

[voodoo]

Ive tried the smooth scrolling option on a 600 MHz iBook, 867MHz 12"PB, 1GHz 12" PB and a 1.25 GHz 15" PB.

With the arrow buttons scrolling was never smooth. On none of the machines.
With the space bar the scrolling was relatively smooth on the 1 GHz PB and the 1.25 GHz PB.
With scroll wheel on mouse it was smooth on the top 2.

Not perfectly smooth - only 'smooth', While on the PeeCees at school (although a lot more powerful 3 GHz machines) the scrolling is butter smooth. Or smooth as the ass of a megababe. If you will.

[arekkusu]

I heartily encourage everyone who wants to see better scrolling in OS X to send Apple feedback or log bugs. It's the best way for customers to tell Apple what they want.

I left feedback about getting smooth scrolling early on in Jaguar, and it showed up in Panther. So they do listen.

[Mediaman_12]

I am going to add some opposition in to this thread.
I use a P3 Windows XP PC all day at work, and yes the scrolling is faster, but I HATE IT .
In my job as a web designer I often have to copy chunks of text from Word in to Dreamwever. Anything up to 'one windows' worth is fine drag over the text copy paste in to the webpage, no probs, any amount that requires the window to scroll (expecially at small amount) is a nightmare of zero accuracy. The document scrolls so dam quickly before you realise you have selected the next 4 pages. I end up selecting a bit copy paste it, scroll the window (with the scroll arrows) do a bit more etc. The 'Super Speed' scrolling on the PC is garbage if you want to do more than scroll webpages, I hope Apple NEVER replicates this.

[ryju]

Originally posted by GeneShifter:
Hmm, that's not good news. That might be due to your low CPU speed because Safari is no problem on my PB 12" with 256MB RAM.

I wonder when Apple is going to get it right. The one gripe I have (that I should have mentioned earlier) is window resizing. This really does suck in OS X. It's an embarassment.

That's what I figured, however it's disappointing because my Mac is definitely more powerful than the PC, yet the Mac is worse at scrolling. But I've gotten used to it.

[Theodour]

I think it is a lower level thing.

If you slowly drag a browser window down on the Mac, it makes little jumps, line by line. On windows, those line-by-line jumps are shallower, thus making it look a lot smoother.

[bernardb]

Originally posted by voodoo:
Funny, I have a 600 MHz iBook with 8MByte Rage 128 and I'd say there is just a barely noticeable delay from the time I click a menu and when it opens. You have a fantastically more powerful machine and yet you describe it the same way...? Perhaps that teensie delay is programmed into the system

voodoo, I think you misunderstood. I said with all the eyecandy options turned on in WINDOWS XP, WinXP shows a noticeable delay in accessing menus, NOT in OSX. The GUI stuff on my Mac is beautiful and smooth except for the scrolling...