Sluggish Animations?

Strange. I have the late 2008, 15" MBP, 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM. The animations are, if anything, better than ever. I am running in the low performance graphics setting. I wonder what the difference is in our machines?

charlie

For me it is just switching between difference spaces has a slight jerkiness to it. Nothing terrible, just under 10.5.8 it was VERY smooth, so it is noticeable on 10.6 ...

I don't seem to notice problems with animations anywhere else, just in spaces...

Chris

For me the animations appeared very smooth on my MacBook Pro when running 10.6, but they were very obviously much choppier than before on my iMac. Animations on my MBP ran smoothly with either GPU, so I don't really know what the deal is with the iMac (other than perhaps the higher resolution), although animations were smooth with 10.5.8.

to add to my earlier posts i'm getting trackpad problems. sometimes it doesn't work. not sure why its been working fine now. before my isight wasn't working either but it worked after rebooting. this os has got some problems they need to fix.

My animations were fine in 10.5.8, and some a quite choppy now. Spaces is a bit, but it's most noticeable entering time machine, which looks very choppy now and was totally smooth before.
I am running a 2009 2.66 Quad Core Mac Pro, and my 640GB system drive has 432GB free, so it is definately not a hardware issue.

Yup, same issue here. On a Mac Pro with tons of ram and drive space. Very sluggish & choppy animation with switching spaces.

Yep, you can add me to the list. Just check out the preferences for Finder - swap between the various options and you can see the choppiness / sluggish animations. In 10.5.x these were silky smooth. Also, Spaces and Expose are all choppy too. I'm running a early 2008 MBP 2.4ghz, 4gb RAM, 250gb HD, GeForce 8600M GT 256mb so not exactly low-end.

I read about the quartz extreme enable / beam sync disable trick elsewhere on these forums; neither of which work.

All animations and scrolling took a big hit for me going from 10.5.8 to 10.6 on a Macbook Air (Geforce 9400M). Using Quartz Debug to disable beam sync brings things back to how they were under 10.5.8. Without disabling Beam Sync, the performance is not just "worse", but embarrassingly bad.

What happened!?

Did you try disabling Beam Sync via the command line (plist) or the Quartz Debug application? I had success with the latter (but only while it's still running) but not the former.

Hi,

No, I had not tried disabling beam sync. Doing so does seem to improve things a bit, although there is I think still a hint of jerkiness.. Thanks for the tip.

b.t.w. what is beam sync ? Couldn't find much info on it ...

Hi,

Found a performance comparison of 10.6 to 10.5 on phoronix...

<http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macosx 106benchmarks&num=1>

which is interesting as they also find major graphics regressions, although in other areas things are improved. They also hint that Apple are aware and working on it. Do hope so as so far these really spoils the "OS X" experience...

Good find on the Phoronix article! They did indeed find significant graphics performance regressions that Apple is evidently aware of. Here's hoping that this gets addressed in the next point release (or sooner)!

Probably the simplest explanation of beam sync is that it's supposed to reduce "tearing", where something is moving and e.g. the bottom half of the screen updates first so it appears that the object is "torn". Sometimes also referred to in games as "vertical sync". It basically delays updating the screen until the entire new image has been calculated, so you don't have part old image and part new.

i have it too on a unibody mbp 17" 2.9ghz 4gigs ram 320gb 7200rpm drive, i doubt its hardware because spaces on 10.5.8 was smooth as silk. I noticed it degrade on 5.7 and got better than ever once i updated to 10.5.8 (which was lovely) now its messy again. anyway turning of the vsync in quartz debugger is ok and it does makes it less laggy but also makes it tear. Then instead of it being an isolated spaces problem it becomes a tearing issue for all quarts enabled effects like expose desktop showing app minimising etc ...to me thats not nicer thats just making something worse haha.

regardless i think having it set to default is the smartest option because then at least you will know when it has been fixed 😀

peace

brian

Message was edited by: sacredgeometry

I experienced the same 'sluggish' choppy animation. It was at it's worst while it was indexing after installation. When done indexing, it did get a tiny bit smoother. Also a restart improved it for me, but not nearly up to the standard I'm used to getting from my mac. It takes away a lot of the Mac feel and experience.

I must add that I did an upgrade and was going to try a fresh install to see if that fixed anything, but when looking through this topic, I changed my mind as I see people with fresh installs have the same 'problem'.

71.23GB out of 249.72GB used (meaning there is 173.23GB free space)
Also 4GB of ram where at current time 2.4GB is free.

I believe it wouldn't be stupid for Apple to look into this, and highly hope Apple agrees. Thanks 🙂