Pat,
I feel your pain.
I'm on a late 2013 Retina Macbook Pro 15", Quad-core i7 @ 2GHz, 16gb of ram, 256gb PCIe SSD, Intel IRIS pro graphics. A pretty solid amount of computer, but OpenCPN is painfully slow. It's usable, but not pleasant.
OpenGL on or off doesn't seem to make much difference...