Cura on Mac vs Windows

[StormLord 0]

Hi to all

I'm using Cura 4 on a Mac and I have unbelievable laggy interface.

When I use Windows version everything is as it should be.

Why is that? Do I need to set something?

The video below shows what exactly is the behaviour on the 2 versions and Windows version is running through a virtual machine!

 

Cura on Mac OS vs Cura on Virtualised win 10

[NBull 14]

Hi. I can't get your video to work!

 

For the most part i also use Cura on Mac. And I will say that in general it's a bit more temperamental then Pc. I use 3.6 and to me it run without any problems "mostly" so cant say if 4.0 is worse.

 

Ps. Do you use a Mac whit two graphics cards? (Macbook Pro)
This will sometimes bug Cura.

[StormLord 0]

No, I'm using a Mac Pro 3,1 with mojave and nvidia 8800GT. The thing is that in the same machine on the same OS the virtualised cura works OK and it is usable, Also if I boot into windows 10 via bootcamp, Cura flies. It's like they are using some awful language in mac os  for GUI that it is at least 20 times slower than its windows counterpart.

 

youtube address of the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaOm01mTOpE

[ahoeben 1,952]

I think the Mac version is using software rendering on your machine. If you share your logs we can be sure. 

Edited March 5, 2019 by ahoeben

[nilrog 103]

I think it is something with Mojave and Cura that has made the app more or less unusable, and not only Cura. I use both Cura and S3D on an MBA that only has Intel Graphics and in the past (as in pre-Mojave) zooming etc. was ok...but now both of them are soo slooow that I hardly want to look at the sliced model 😞 Everything else works ok...and even Fusion360 still works just as fine as it did pre-Mojave.

 

For Nvidia cards Mojave is the beginning of the end with Apple, sadly, as they have more or less dropped support for those cards and users are reporting performance issues with Mojave.

[Smithy 1,144]

I don't think it is only a problem with Mojave, must be a combination of Mojave and specific hardware.

I use Cura without any problems on MacBook Pro 13", MacBook Pro 15" and an iMac 5k. All machines are on Mojave.

 

But it is strange, I can remember there was a user who had exactly the same notebook and had a lot of performance problems, me not - so that's strange. I guess that maybe some 3rd party software installs or changes some libraries which could cause the problems. OpenGl or something like that.

[ahoeben 1,952]

The problem lies with an updated Qt framework and how that handles creating OpenGL contexts (compared to older versions of Qt)

[StormLord 0]

On 3/7/2019 at 9:12 AM, ahoeben said:

The problem lies with an updated Qt framework and how that handles creating OpenGL contexts (compared to older versions of Qt)

And how is that solved? 

Should I install an older qt framework? Or the developers should compile for the older one?

[ahoeben 1,952]

This needs to be solved in Cura. AFAIK, there is no workaround at the moment.

[StormLord 0]

I tried the version 4.2.1 and the results are AMAZING! even though the selection on the settings are still quite slow, the 3d rotation of the bed plate with the object is totally changed and VERY fast, even faster than windows, the same to preview layout that was just unusable. 

I tried to search a history what changed on the Mac version from 4 to 4.2 and can't find anything, is there a history for the versions ?

 

P.S it's not something I've changed on my Mac, because I also have Cura 4 and it's crawling as before, but man! 4.2.1 is getting work done again!

[ahoeben 1,952]

I think the speedup is due to a fix I contributed which was first included in Cura 4.1. Glad it is working for you.

[StormLord 0]

That was not a minor speedup, that was revelation! Did it had to do with qt framework handling?

 

[ahoeben 1,952]

See this for details: https://github.com/Ultimaker/Uranium/pull/478