MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro 555X: good enough for smooth and low-latency drawing using simple brushes?

[acorello]

I'd like to move the first steps in the digital arts world as a hobby. I tried with my current macBook Pro and a Wacom tablet and found the lag too bad to enjoy drawing (it's a mid-2015 4-core i7 with 16GB RAM and only the integrated Intel Iris Pro GPU)

As I'm looking for an upgrade I'm wondering what's the minimum that could give me a low-latency drawing experience. I know that brushes can be very computationally expensive if one wants to simulate liquid colours dripping and blending with other layers and whatnot. So let's say I'm going to stick to pencil-like or fairly simple brushes.

Would a macBook Pro 2018 i7-6core, 16GB RAM, and a Radeon Pro 555X 4GB be enough?

I'm using Affinity Designer V2.

[Komatös]

Hi @acorello and welcome to the forum.

I don't know how to find the settings on macOS. You should look about Settings -> Tools. There a the option "Tablet Input Method". Try the different modes, to see if one of them solve the lag.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, acorello said:

I tried with my current macBook Pro and a Wacom tablet and found the lag too bad to enjoy drawing (it's a mid-2015 4-core i7 with 16GB RAM and only the integrated Intel Iris Pro GPU)

So you mean the low-latency lag especially in combination with the Wacom tablet, or in generally, so also when using a mouse here?

 

[acorello]

28 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

So you mean the low-latency lag especially in combination with the Wacom tablet, or in generally, so also when using a mouse here?

Also when using the mouse.

I just recorded the following video where I draw a line using brush Pencil-128 on Designer 2.1.1 . No other software running on the machine. The stroke completed almost about a second after I released the mouse button.

The specs are MacBook Pro mid-2015, 4-Core i7 2,5 GHz with 16GB RAM and only integrated Intel Iris Pro GPU.

I reckon the pressure-sensitive tablet was performing even worse.

 

[acorello]

41 minutes ago, Komatös said:

Hi @acorello and welcome to the forum.

I don't know how to find the settings on macOS. You should look about Settings -> Tools. There a the option "Tablet Input Method". Try the different modes, to see if one of them solve the lag.

Thanks. I reckon there is something else going on as it's also happening with the mouse but it's good to know that may help improving the performance.

[v_kyr]

40 minutes ago, acorello said:

Also when using the mouse.

You didn't told which macOS version you're actually running, as there were some known partly issues in this regard with for example Big Sur (maybe other OS versions hardware dependent too). - Search also over the net for your specific macOS and Macbook Pro version for that, in order to see some other reports and possible solutions then ...

• Slow MacBook Pro Mid-2015
• If graphics tasks slow down your Mac
• Trackpad on MacBook Pro Lagging, How to Fix?
• 11.5 still laggy on Early 2015 MBP?
• ...
• macbook drawing lag

[acorello]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

You didn't told which macOS version you're actually running

Monterey 12.6.7

Thanks for the pointers, I'll try investigating. For clarity, I'm not seeing lag in any tasks

Can someone confirm that the performance I'm seeing would be unexpected on a MacBook Pro 2019 i7-6core 16+GB RAM with Radeon Pro 555X 4GB? 

[v_kyr]

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