Hello,
A solution for you:
Retina Mac owners can greatly improve the graphics performance of many applications (including Embrilliance) by setting the color profile (in System Preferences, Displays, Color tab) to “Generic RGB.”
If you love Apple and aren’t a techie, you’re done. Have a nice day!
But…
…Techies may want to know what is happening:
Why does changing the color profile of the monitor affect the speed? It shouldn’t. That should have no effect on programs at all.
Under the hood, there is a single drawing command for all operating systems – on Windows it’s known as BitBlt (“bit blit”) and on Mac it’s CGContextDrawImage. It is usually the fastest operation possible – it puts an image onto the screen, so it has to be. Apple hosed theirs with the addition of the color profiles by using the main processor to adjust colors of every pixel as they’re output.They didn’t even use the GPU which could deal with it easily.
If you have this speed issue, you don’t need to lower the resolution of your game, app or program: Just change the monitor color profile to Generic RGB!
If you have another color profile, such as Default LCD, then you are waiting for the Mac to up-convert the image, which it does at 4 times the needed depth. Apparently it also does some floating point arithmetic and then it down-converts it again to display it. Others have shown that, even if Apple had a reason for doing this, the code could have been made much faster.
People seem to think that switching to the latest Apple technology, Metal, might help. It possibly could help on GPU Macs, but that’s not an answer: The thing is broken and Apple should fix it. We don’t need to introduce a heavy technology just because Apple has sloppy code.
Let Apple know? Sure, we have done that. Others have done that. With every single one of the support incidents we’ve used with Apple in the last 10 years, all of them have been refunded: They told us to file bug reports, and we have, but not one thing is fixed. Just in case you were wondering.
It used to be that you could buy an Apple because it ‘just works.’ Now they’re too complex and Apple isn’t keeping up with their own changes.
Why won’t someone just keep it simple? Stick with the basics. The Essentials. Oh, wait, that’s us.
Cheers,
-Brian
UPDATE
It is December 2021 and Apple’s new Mac with Apple Silicon processors (M1) are out. Magically, the display issue is gone. Also gone is the ability to change the display to RGB so it is a good thing they figured it out.