Choppy/jerky UI in Mountain Lion

could be some other third party software conflict....

perian is the "video swiss army knife" that provides codecs for a lot of otherwise pain in the *** to use on a mac video formats -- do you have anything else installed that might be messing with the way quicktime is being interpretted? that's what it looks like Perian was doing for me....

FWIW, VLC did come back to life as well after the Perian uninstall

+1

On a MacPro 2010 ATI 5870. Dock sometimes smooths out for a few minutes, but going in and out of Mission Control seems to throw everything out of whack.

Same here. MBP 2009 2.56Ghz 4MB RAM 15" It happened when I upgraded to Lion, and mysteriously solved itself... When I installed Mountain Lion, it was fine, then I suppose after updating various software, the choppy/jerky graphics returned. Very annoying.

I'm seeing the same thing. The mouse pointer is lagged / choppy using either the trackpad or a wired mouse on my late 2008 model 13" MacBook (4 GB RAM). Overall, the UI is choppy and sputtering. What happened? It's small things like this that can accumulate into a very bad overal user experience. Scrolling is choppy for me in Safari and MS Word.

I'm using an Early-2011 13" MBP, which was upgraded from Lion and it runs really smooth. I'm not experiencing any lag issues, with Mission Control or anything.

Could be a 3rd party thing.

Brand new MBP Retina, 8GB RAM... Upgraded to Mountain Lion and seeing chopiness compared to Lion when just maimizing/restoring windows. Most notable slowdowns when working in Parallels 7 or VMW Fusion. 2 - 3 second pause when switching in or out of full screen mode in Parallels. Virtuals take longer to boot and react sluggishly compared to Lion.

Confirmed the issue by doing a clean restore back to Lion and reinstalling Parallels. Worked normal. Then, after upgrading a second time to Mountain Lion, seeing the same issues.

Same thing with me. While my computer is aging, it has never done anything like this before.

Late 2009 Mac Pro

2x 2.26GHz quad-core Nehalem

6GB RAM

GT120 graphics (512MB)

16GB left on system drive (336GB left on my second drive)

Choppy animations mostly in Mission Control, Notification Center, the Dock, and minimizing/restoring windows from time to time. Launchpad is very smooth, as is switching users. At first when I saw this problem I was worried it was time to upgrade my graphics or RAM, but it's slightly reassuring to see that others, even with newer machines, are having these sorts of problems as well.

Here is a video of the flickering I'm experiencing. http://youtu.be/NM8RToGZ71A

This is on a brand new iMAC 27inch 3.4GHz i7 8MB L3Cache, 16GB RAM, 2GB AMD Graphics card, Flash Drive with 2TB internal storage drive. This thing is tricked out and extremely fast. I bought it last month. It was running fine until the Mountain Lion upgrade. Ridiculous. I've been a PC user for 15+ years and this is the 'cheap tacky' I would expect from PC. Strangely, it's never happened to me on a PC. PCs get a bad rap. I've actually never had any real problems with PCs. Currently running a 2008 Dell XPS 420 that I've modified and it runs great. It sits right next to my iMAC. Why did I switch to MAC again? Oh yeah...they look cool. But definitely not to waste my entire weekend trying to figure out how to fix software that was obviously released way too early.

After opening software systematically, I discovered it was AutoCAD causing the issue. So it was 3rd party software and an update after loading Mountain Lion. Once I closed out of AutoCAD, the choppy graphics 'magically' went away. Everything is smooth again. I recommend opening and loading each software program, then closing, and check your graphics. Start with non os x software (i.e. not mail, cal, itunes, etc.). Hope this helps, I'm happy again.

May I bag you guys who have still problems with the jerking mountain lion to test following system behaviour:

1) Switching the Space via trackpad gesture is jerking in a random way - not always the same "jerkness level"

2) Switching the Space via keyboard shortcut is much faster and does not jerk in any way.

3) Is your configuration a Bluetooth based Trackpad and keyboard?

4) Are you using some trackpad extensions like Jitouch or BetterTouchTool?

5) Have you problems jumping to space 3 via keyboard shortcut (sounds strange, but I am observing this behaviour in my configuration).

Best regards.

Hi,

1) Correct

2) Correct

3) Yes

4) Yes, BetterTouchTool 0.781

5) Will test further

Not seeing much jerkiness with transition between spaces -- it's there, but is not as bad as jerkiness in other UI elements (like the Dock, though now that I've switched to the 2D Dock it's gotten better, or zooming in and panning with Ctrl+scrolling through Universal Access), screensavers, etc.

1) Not noticeably

2) Not noticeably

3) Yes, both

4) No

5) No problems with Ctrl+arrow keys here, but then again spaces don't seem to be much of a problem for me.

I uninstalled my trackpad extension JITouch and deactivated the device access in the preferences. The bad effect in the trackpad-driven change-space-animation still remains. I further deletet all the system cachen in /Library/Caches/ and ˜/Library/Caches/ but it didn't help. I disabled every "autostart"-application - but the jerking animation reamains.

I noticed, that within this space-change-animation mountain lion keeps dropping window shadows. In Lion the shadows where dropped after(!) finishing the animation. Is there a possibilty to disable this "show shadows while chaning workspace"-effect?

I'm experiencing the same graphics lag in the dock, notification center, spaces, and mission control...also minimizing/maximizing windows. My "software" in this case, however, is playing a Netflix video in Safari. When I still had 10.7 Lion, I could run a Netflix video in one window, YouTube video in another window, and all interface graphics animations would STILL be smooth. Definitely has to be a software issue in Mountain Lion...ugh.