![]() El Capitan was consistently smoother than Yosemite. We loaded up the exact same apps in both operating systems and used Mission Control, swiped between desktops, and entered and exited full screen mode. We connected our test MacBook Pro and its Iris 5200 GPU to an external 60Hz SST 4K display and set the scaling mode as high as it would go on both screens ("looks like 1920×1200" on the internal display, "looks like 3008×1692" on the external screen). ![]() We’re hoping that Metal can help with that, and at this early stage it does look like animation performance can be much better in El Capitan than in Yosemite. AdvertisementĮspecially if you have multiple high-resolution displays connected to your Mac or if you’re using a system with a relatively underpowered GPU like the Retina MacBook, this can lead to choppy and inconsistent performance. The way OS X handles scaling (making a screen that looks like a 1280×800 display look like a 1440×900 display instead) is cleaner for users and developers than the system Windows uses, but it’s harder on your GPU, which is asked to draw resolutions far beyond your display panel’s native resolution. What we’re hoping is that Metal can help with fluidity and responsiveness on 4K and 5K displays and on Retina screens, especially when they’re being used at scaled, non-native resolutions. Apple's own apps-Final Cut Pro and the like-are more than likely to pick up Metal support, too.Īside from heavy 3D applications, Apple has also integrated Metal support into Core Graphics and Core Animation-these are responsible for 2D rendering and most of the animation that happens on the OS X desktop. Apple boasted of an 8x rendering performance improvement in Adobe After Effects and companies like Adobe, The Foundry, and Autodesk. This can simultaneously speed up graphics while also leaving the CPU free to handle physics calculations, AI, or other things the GPU can't do.Īpple's sales pitch for Metal leans primarily on the gaming use case, outlined above, and for professional apps that use 3D rendering or GPU compute. Metal's primary function is to move some of the processing load from the CPU to the GPU to alleviate bottlenecks, particularly those related to draw calls. Metal is another feature imported from iOS, a graphics and GPU compute API designed to eliminate some of the overhead of OpenGL and OpenCL. So we're not looking at an iOS-esque level of system lockdown just yet, though there are no promises that System Integrity Protection won't become mandatory in some future version of OS X. There's a new item under the Utilities menu that will let you toggle System Integrity Protection on and off for El Capitan volumes. If you do, reboot into your El Capitan Mac's recovery partition. If you never dive into any of those folders, you won't notice the difference in day-to-day usage. That's one way to protect important operating system files from external tampering! ![]() Not even administrators can add to these folders or edit files that are in them, though they retain their access to the rest of the files on the drive. This list includes /System, /bin, /usr ( but not /usr/local), and /sbin. Users who installed their own SSDs had to hunt down third-party tools that enabled TRIM in an unsupported way.System Integrity Protection, also called "rootless," is a new system security feature that prevents the user or any process from writing in system-protected folders. Historically, Mac OS X has only enabled TRIM for the solid-state drives Apple provides. ![]() Windows 7 and newer have had built-in support for TRIM, which they enable for all SSDs. The SSD can then manage its available storage more intelligently. TRIM ensures the physical NAND memory locations containing deleted files are erased before you need to write to them. This causes your SSD to slow down over time unless TRIM is enabled. With flash memory, it’s faster to write to empty memory - to write to full memory, the memory must first be erased and then written to. The SSD knows that the file is deleted and it can erase the file’s data from its flash storage. When an operating system uses TRIM with a solid-state drive, it sends a signal to the SSD every time you delete a file. RELATED: Why Solid-State Drives Slow Down As You Fill Them Up Why TRIM is Important, and Why Macs Don’t Always Enable It by Default
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