Lion animation glitchy

It does look like your machine is fully rated for Lion—as you said.

What you describe is what I experience on a daily use Mac Mini with a very inadequate GMA 950 graphics subsystem. As soon as Snow Leopard was installed, that machine preformed slowly.

And when Lion was installed the same choppiness persisted.

However, after waiting a full 24hrs for the indexing to complete (many drives attached to that machine, Lion is noticeably faster than Leopard or Snow Leopard. Especially Safari.

The animation choppy remains, but it is a smoother choppy than under Snow Leopard.

So, did you wait a day or two for the background routines to finish their conversion processes? If not I would suggest that you do.

-Alan

In your original post it seemed as if you were reconfiguring your machine, instead of just using it. -Sorry for the mis-understanding.

But I take your response to mean that you have been operating Lion normally. Two days is far more than enough time for it to run normally.

Hopefully someone else with your exact machine will report here.

In the meantime I'll keep digging, but so far I can't find anything.

Things to do:

• You may want to try bringing your system up in 'Safe Boot' mode and see how it operates then.

• Also, start the Utilities / Activity Monitor and sort via CPU usage column and watch for any runaway processes.

• And start the Utilities / Console program, Select "All Messages" from the left pane then see if the right pane is logging many continuous messages of the same type.

-Alan

I, too, am seeing very choppy system animations (3-ish fps) in Lion. Like you, I have a Mac Pro, though mine has 2x Nvidia 7300 GTs, not the ATIs. These 7300s have been plagued with performance and OpenGL-compaitibliy problems since the day they came out, so my first thought on the animation issue is that they were the culprit. Since you have different cards, perhaps not.

Here's my rig's specs:

• MacPro (2008)
• 2 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
• 16 GB RAM
• 2x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT w/256 MB RAM each

Really really choppy, never thought to see that on iMac i7 2.8Ghz with 8Gb of ram and a ATI 4850 with 512MB. I've tried also the scrollbar hints, but can't see an increase in performance. This is really ******* me off. Hope in a future update.

Hi there,

This seems very strange, especially as your machine has plenty of RAM, which Lion needs.

As another user said, it may take a few days of usage for the computer to settle down. When I first installed Lion it was frustratingly slow, but after a few days of usage, it is fine.

Try opening Activity Monitor, and seeing if you have any unnecessary processes which are hogging RAM or CPU, and quit them if necessary.

Hope this helps,

Nathan

Hello Nathan,

thank you for answering.

Actually checking the use of the system resources was the first thing I did, I can't see nothing unusual (unfortunately). I'm using Lion since the day after the launch. This is my home machine and I'm not using so much, I hope it will improve its performance in the future using it more, because for now I'm seriously thinking to downgrade it.

By the way I think that is the price to pay at a first release, I thought about issues but not graphic issues on an old hardware.

Ciao,

Andrea

Thank you Nspyro, that is exactly the same machine. Yesterday I've ran also geekbench 32-bit to test performance and the score is OK comparing to the same model.

This machine was updated. If I have time this weekend I will try to make a clean install of Lion on another partition of the same machine and see if there is some conflict with other software, but from what I see in monitor seems to be not.

I will also check on the internet for a GPU test to check if it could be a faulty hardware.

Bye,

Andrea

see the blog post here: http://bit.ly/pNtLWS

it seems to be adobe flash player related - though, nothing official from apple or adobe yet...

@nanofunk - I'm not sure what the system freezes mentioned in your post have to do with choppy animation. These seem to be unrelated issues.

So yesterday I had enough time to create a new partition on the same machine and made a new CLEAN install of Lion.. no choppy animation anymore. Can't see any sort of differences(RAM, CPU cycles) in Activity Monitor between the upgraded and the clean installation.

I'm seriously thinking to format the mac, made a clean install and restore users and application with migration assistant... hoping to fix that issue.

Yes I'm seeing glitchy animations too that weren't there in Snow Leopard. You can mainly notice a flicker (or redraw, rather) when switching between apps located on different Desktops. I'd never experienced any slow redraw using Spaces on 10.6. Granted, my video card is the stock one that comes with a macpro, but I still think there is something funky going on with the video paging as people with significantly higher video cards on here are also reporting it. Is there a way to turn off certain animation features on Lion?

@Gandalf - I haven't tried these myself, but I ran across this article yesterday:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/26/hackinations-5-really-good-lion-tweaks/

Check the first and last tips.