Sluggish Animations?

Some more observations on my side:

- During the first minutes after booting up, animations are fine. After a few minutes of usage and/or after having opened several windows, animations start slowing down.

- I also noticed that, with iTunes running in the background, whenever iTunes moves to the next song in my playlist, my whole Mac is unresponsive for a couple of seconds. It's not just animations.

Any ideas?

Actually, I discovered that the reason why my mac was becoming much slower when iTunes changed song was because iTunes was set to show the songs in Cover Flow mode, hence using animations.

This morning, my Mac welcomed me with a Black Screen Of Death. It looks like my graphics card died, and my mother board is going to have to be replaced. I wonder if this could have anything to do with the sluggish animations I had been experiencing for a few weeks, after upgrading to 10.6.

I will mention that to the tech guys during my scheduled appointment on Tuesday. I will post a followup here, in case anyone is interested.

Hello,

my problem is that several animations like minimize and maximize windows, Expose etc are a little bit choppy. I know that this problem is known by several users but i have discovered something curious.

*_Go to the Dock properties and use "Minimize the windows into the application icon" instead of minimizing them to the far right of the dock_*

Then all the minimize and maximize animations of the windows are perfect smooth.

And that is very curious. Can anyone explain this ???

Message was edited by: Helios1979

Can someone confirm this effect ?

I saw this only on Notebooks.

I just came back from the repair shop. The technician told me that my NVIDIA card had died, and that this was due to a common, known problem with that card that both Apple and NVIDIA have officially acknowledged. The card is not sufficiently thermally insulated, and some connections can melt. You can have this repaired free of charge, even if your mac is no longer under warranty.

I told him about my recent update to 10.6, and the sluggish animations I had experienced soon after, and soon before the card died. He was a bit fuzzy about it, and could not officially confirm that the sluggish animations may have been caused by the update to 10.6.

If you guys are experiencing sluggish animations, and you have a hardware setup similar to mine (especially when it comes to the NVIDIA card), I suggest you show your mac to a technician to know whether you are eligible for a free replacement.

Hope this helps

After updating to 10.6.3, I've noticed remarkably smoother animations when I'm running on battery power.

For the longest time since updating to Snow Leopard, I had the same issues most people in this thread were having: sluggish animations for expose, spaces, switching spaces, etc. I had this problem particularly when I was running on battery power; when plugged into power, the sluggishness went away.

But now, it all seems to work as it should! Yay!

The situation is a little bit better with the 10.6.3 update, but still more choppy than 10.5.8 (which was choppy on my late 2009 mac mini w/ nvidia 9400)

The OS X 10.6.3 update has certainly improved things here a lot. I no long really see any sort of display issues when switching spaces. I cannot say for sure with comparing side by side, which I am not going to do, but probably just about as good as thongs where back with 10.5.8, before I upgraded to SL.

Chris

Hi all,

I just got my MacBook Pro back from the repair shop. They replaced the NVIDIA card — which meant replacing the whole motherboard. The specs remain the same as in my initial post.

Now, all animations run smoothly. I'm still under 10.6.2; I haven't upgraded to 10.6.3 yet.

So my personal conclusion is: in my case, the sluggish animations were due to a faulty NVIDIA card. It was so faulty that it ended up dying prematurely. Replacing this faulty card fixed it. It is not clear whether the upgrade to 10.6 had anything to do with it.

Hope this helps

My animations are now completely fixed, I have no traces of choppy or "sluggish" animations

for sure 10.6.3 improved animations performance...

But the "Powermizer" stuff is still the biggest problem.
Apple should make this option changeble. Is so obvious that people wouldn't like to have their animations choppy... even at battery supply...

Message was edited by: fpena

"But the 'Powermizer' stuff is still the biggest problem. "
Well said. The powermizer "bug" still exists, and is very annoying. You must repeat every sudden movement multiple times (even window movements) to experience the full speed of the system and animations.

I have a mac mini with the 9400M, and I have the same problem as you guys with the powermizer. Almost never things goes smooth at the first click.Sometimes the docktips get sluggish , specially if I am in heavy flash web page.APPLE, PLEASE, FIX IT !

Maybe will be fixed in 10.6.4:)