New mac pro playback issues & sluggish

Question

got my new mac pro this week. wanted a fesh start, so didn't migrate anything. started by installing my must-have apps: adobe cc, ableton, apogee, fontexplorer, natove instrument komplete. everything worked great. then suddenly, when vreating a simple project in premiere, playback didn't work. and neither in quicktime nor itunes. started seeing the beachball in many apps, everything totally sluggish. started deleting apps, but nothing seemed to help. anybody had similar issues?

Answer 1

My own remedy is more of the ounce of prevention:
Clone the system so you have the nice vanilla system as it was backed up to another drive volume or sparse image.
One person runs multiple copies of Mavericks in VMs using VMware Fusion to allow testing any changes first; restore a VM back to before changes, or to switch a VM to a boot image.
Create a bootable clone of the system, before making changes, in case a system does go south, or just for testing.
Sluggish is so common but generic, and how many apps run concurrently or have been tested to work even with 10.9.1 builds along with change to new hardware?
The things we may not see or be aware of, might be like this one uncovered and mentioned on Ars:
In our recent review of the late 2013 Mac Pro, one of our sticking points was the OpenGL performance that trailed Windows on the same hardware. A particularly damning case was the high-polygon-scene performance in Autodesk Maya showing how OpenGL viewport 2 performance fell off a cliff when you pushed into very high polygon counts of over 20 million with the D700 in OS X. 
While this issue still needs to be resolved for some programs like modo, some quick sleuthing by Apple and AMD shows that the problem was on the Autodesk side. Maya was not simply querying the GPU RAM; for some reason, it was using a hard ceiling on OS X, so the brutal performance hit was the result of that ceiling. Once you explicitly tell Maya to use your available VRAM with the environment variable MAYA_OGS_GPU_MEMORY_LIMIT=6000 in ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2014-x64/Maya.env, performance is perceptibly the same as in Windows in Boot Camp with very large scenes:
If you have a GPU with more than 1GB of VRAM, I highly recommend setting this environment variable to your GPU's VRAM amount. This issue will reportedly be fixed in Maya 2015, but Maya is clearly an absolutely massive program with some annoying issues—here is my blog post on how to fix Maya performance when the Help Line is visible in OS X.
So, fellow Maya users, I just need to implicate Apple in another 17,000-word article about our other bugs, and we'll have them fixed in no time! This brings us to the question of why I thought to blame this on drivers and not the Mac Maya version to begin with. It's odd that this Mac-only hard-coded VRAM amount existed at all because Maya is very much the same beast on all platforms, and from my knowledge of it as a beta tester, platforms don't get specific attention for tuning, and that's the case for the dominant platform as well. That's why I assumed that this was a driver bug and not Maya-specific.
Anyway, we'd like to thank AMD and Apple for their quick work with Autodesk to resolve this issue. We'll be updating the review today to account for this new information.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/02/2013-mac-pro-firepro-d700-opengl-is-better- than-we-thought-it-was/
I don't always follow my own advice, sometimes it works out, sometimes not, but any OS like Apple's needs a couple updates, and any new hardware needs some firmware revision, chips, changes in production, and time to ah "field test" new system in the real world.