Sluggish Animations?

look up snowleopard bugs on youtube i am sure you find some you didnt know where there which are equally important to clear up, like the expose one that makes it get stuck and the blue surrounding glow tracking before the window....although this is only noticable for me wen using shift to slow the windwos then moving the mouse around

Oh I definitly agree there are equally as important bugs to fix! Most probably even bigger ones! And I do hope Apple takes those bugs more seriously than this problem. What I was trying to say, though, is that I hope Apple will not classify as an un-important 'bug' and eventually leaving it till 10.6.5 or something. Like I said, this takes away a huge part of the whole Mac experience for me.

Message was edited by: W-out - (typo's)

Expose on 10.5 was silky smooth but on 10.6 a jumpy instead of smooth animation occurs every so often.

This is using a clean installation of Snow Leopard.

It looks like this problem mostly persist on late 2008 unibody macbook pro's, and some other devices with the 9400M chipset/graphics card. Although I can't image the 9400M being the problem, as when I go into 'High Performance' mode and thus activate the 9600M GT, the problem still persists. Even though it's a tad bit faster while using the 9600M GT, it's still choppy.
Also, my brother's Macbook (polycarbonate white one) which also has a 9400M chipset/graphics card, runs as smooth as a hot knife through butter.

Maybe it's some combination of hardware? Has anyone that's experiencing this slowness upgraded their RAM by any chance? As I did, I put 2x Crucial DDR3 SO-DIMM 1066MHz 2GB in my Macbook Pro (more stats below). I had no problems using the ram though, my macbook pro sleeps and awakes just fine. What about all of you? Maybe we can figure this out.

yeah probably but id like to say i have the same issue and im running a 2009 unibody 17"

...with 4 gigs of ddr3 and a 2.9ghz cpu i dont think its a performance issue some how

Hm, ok that's interesting.
Well, the only thing I see we all have in common here is that every mac with this problem uses the 9400M Chipset (which is also used when activating the 9600M GT)
But as I mentioned before, my brothers polycarbonate Macbook with the 9400M chipset runs just fine... (edit: Yes, with Snow Leopard)

yeah that is odd it doesnt seem to make any difference which chip im running on its still nothing like as smooth as 10.5.8 and theres no graphical difference really, i mean surely if they rewrote it in cocoa it might even be faster :S i guess its just a conflict somwhere....i would have though they would have at least done more tesing on their current line of laptops :S i have heard this issue on mac pros as well so its not isolated to the nvidia chips

Hi,

In the phoronix report I posted the link to in a previous posting,

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

they used mac minis. An older one with an intel graphics chipset, and a newer one with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M. Both seem to show the same regression in opengl performance going from 10.5.8 to 10.6.0.

They don't explicitly mention the same sort of issue we are discussing here, but its not much of a stretch to assume they could be related.

In another report they compare OSX 10.6 to various ubuntu releases.

<http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu karmicleopard&num=1>

frankly, some of the comparisons Apple should be ashammed of, they are that bad...

( Phonorix aren't the be all and end all of course, but I think they comparisons are good enough to mean something )

i agree but its too early to tell, given that no real drivers have been written to optimise for the new platform figures at this stage are more or less meaningless

It's worst for me on the animations that have actually been re-done like Exposé, and spaces. Actually, was 'Spaces' re-done in snow leopard? Not sure, but Stacks are still reasonably smooth for me, not super smooth, but it never was super smooth in 10.5.8 either.
Normal stuff like simply dragging a window around and scrolling is still super smooth for me.
The link, mentioned earlier to some benchmark article, says Apple is aware of this (or a similar) issue? Are they really? Should we report this somewhere or will Apple notice this thread themselves? It would just be nice to know if it's worth discussing this any further if Apple's already put this on their list of 'problems' or not.

*edit: Didn't see the posts above as I was actually typing this post, made some small edits to correct it.

The comment about Apple "being aware" was in one of the comparison links I posted. That is all it is, just a comment and we have to it at face value.

You are correct, we don't really know what Apple thinks of this, or even if they are aware. As is the way with Apple they are a black hole when it comes to support issues sometimes... Things go in, nothing comes out.

I agree, if there was some official way to send feedback, that might help, if we all did... I've only ever used the automatic crash report thing, which doesn't really help here.

well yeah apple are a bit secretive one what will or not be in future updates so until they are released we are left guessing if they know or not haha but either way its only some mild anoyances and performance issues that need to be ironed out and this could be an amazing os......please god dont turn into a me/vists :S ....i doubt it i mean leopard was the same, tiger was the same ...and so on and so forth it will get fixed and by 10.6.8 it will be silky smooth haha and by that time sabertooth tiger will be out :S what ever they call it 😀

Well, there's a feedback page: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Just not sure how much use it is, or if I'd actually be bothering Apple by sending feedback when we're already posting our info on this issue over here.

I have the same problems on a Macbook Pro 3,1. The spaces animations are unusable. And to be honest it is no fun using SL with spaces at the moment.