I recently purchased a 13-inch Macbook Air (using the Apple Silicon processors), and after adjusting Roblox Studio to my preferences, I found that Roblox Studio suddenly became near-unusable, often dropping to 20 or so FPS in the viewport, even on an empty baseplate and on the lowest possible graphics settings.
This is on a 2K retina monitor that has default scaling options (scaled to look like 1440 x 900), which is below HD as far as Roblox Studio should be concerned.
I was confused because, when I first launched Roblox Studio on one of the more detailed default scenes, I got a buttery smooth 60 FPS. After uninstalling plugins (which messed with my cloud plugin settings since I use multiple devices…) and disabling tabs, I finally found the culprit. Closing the Explorer and Property tabs of all things would bring my FPS back to 60 in the viewport, even on a complex scene!
It turns out having anything docked on the side will cause massive frame drops, and also make the script editor near unusable.
This averages around 30-40 FPS while moving the camera around (the FPS counter on the bottom right is misleading; it really feels like it’s dropping below what the counter says):
Adding a few more docks in makes studio unusable on even an empty baseplate despite the reduced viewport size, and certainly the Script Editor is super hard to use:
A super scuffed workaround is to use Studio windowed and have the side bars float on the side; however, I have to change my OS settings to hide the default menu bar and dock to compensate for the lost space, and this is still super limited on what toolbars I can actually ever have open at a time:
The shrunk space also reduces the “View” menu items to icons and removes their text, which makes it harder to look through to find the toolbar I want to open. This matters because I have to open/close toolbars a lot with my scuffed workaround, given that I can’t dock a number of menus together (the asset manager, insert object, terrain editor, etc. all won’t fit within that bottom dock):
I should also mention… this issue directly makes scripting nearly unusable on the Macbook!
Because the Script Editor always docks new windows alongside the viewport, it makes performance abysmal while trying to edit scripts.
Undocking these script tabs from the viewport immediately boosts the performance while editing scripts, even though there’s a whole viewport rendering in the background!
Unfortunately, there’s no workaround to this issue, because every time you open a new script, it will always dock that new window with the viewport instead of having it float if your last-closed script window was floating.
This makes it really hard for me to develop on this device, since I write a lot of code. Even on very small scripts, I get performance issues entirely related to toolbar/window docking.
Most newer Mac’s (both Intel and M1) running macOS Big Sur seem to have performance issues in Studio. I have been able to reduce the lag in the script editor on my 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro by changing the color profile to the default color profile for my late 2013 13-inch MacBook Pro. It did not get rid of the lag entirely but the script editor is mostly usable for scripts with <800 lines. I mentioned the color profile change and also uploaded the color profiles and some logs on another thread.
I think that this partly being caused by Roblox Studio trying to access some system files that seem to be OpenGL drivers that were removed in macOS Big Sur. The main cause of the lag is probably that Roblox Studio is still using Qt 5 and Qt 5 is not optimized for Big Sur. Qt 5.12 (which is what Studio is most likely using) is supported on macOS versions 10.13 - 10.15 and macOS 11 is not listed on the supported platforms for Qt 5. Qt 6 has macOS Big Sur listed on the supported platforms and Roblox promised us that they will be updating Qt in Studio sometime this year.
Edit: Roblox Studio is using Qt 5.6 and I don’t think that they are going to update it to Qt 6. I hope that they at least update to Qt 5.15 because some other applications that use Qt such as OBS have recently been updating their Qt frameworks to improve performance in newer versions of macOS and I checked the Qt version for OBS and it said Qt 5.15.
I also updated my 2018 MacBook Pro to macOS 11.1 yesterday and noticed a 70-80% performance improvement in Roblox Studio (especially in the script editor). I am also able to edit scripts that are over 1800 lines long with almost no lag at all while using the default color profile.
