Choppy/jerky UI in Mountain Lion

The problem may be due to after Mountain Lion installs, it does an index of your drive (the progress if which is shown in a bar in your spotlight window accessible by command+space). As this process occupies a lot of the drive and CPU time, it slows the system down considerably.

My sluggish performace went away after the process was complete.

I too was having this same issue. After opening up autocad the problems went away. I am wondering how anyone with the same results as me has dealt with the issue in the future. If you uninstall autocad does the issue come back? Do you need to open autocad every time your computer is turned on to fix the issue? I am just trying to find a way to not have to deal with this issue again. Thanks.

This is seriously weird stuff. This issue has been killing me for about a month! Start AutoCad - all better. This is probably the weirdest thing I ever saw on my mac.

After countless installs and using setup assistant and migration assistant trying to work out what was going on with the horrible looking chpooy UI I took the edvice on here and opened up AutoCad then closed it and it worked, very very odd.

This was on a brand spanking new 3.4 i7 iMac 32gb ram / 2gb video / 3TB fusion with only 100gb on the hard drive. My old MBP 2.4ghz core2duo / 4gb ram / 256mb video / 160gb 5200 rpm hd never experanced anything like this.

Saved me a trip to the Apple shop.

Whoa! The AutoCad open totally fixed my system too! Why the heck did it cause all that? How WEIRD!

WOW! Freaking unbelievable! I was 99,9% sure opening autocad wouldn't help but what do you know?! Boom, works like a charm again. Really weird! Was just about to run away to the apple dealer. Brand new imac with 3 reinstalls because of the choppyness. Thank you!

I was also sure this wouldn't work but decided to try. Unfortunately for me I can't get AutoCAD LT to work on my Pro 4,1 with dual ATI Radeon 5870s even though Autodesk 's requirements say this should work. A blog (http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2012/05/autocad-2013-for-mac-whip-fai led-to-initialize.html) said that there were sporadic problems with Mac Pro 4,1 systems like mine being unable to pass the WHIP initialization stage in AutoCAD. I wonder if this is all related - that is the unexpected behavior on AutoCAD & the chopy animations under ML? Anybody else seeing the same or solving the problem?

This is all very strange but this issue is now resolved for me at least.

Although I had tried to solve my problem by making changes and restarting (warm reboot) multiple times, nothing had helped.

However, I just closed all my apps and then did a complete shutdown. Next, I powered up using the button on the front of the Pro (cold reboot). The results are staggering. All of my animations are silky smooth again (opening notification center, opening the Apps folder from the doc, swiping to change desktops and ... the slowest of the slow ... swiping to the dashboard and back.

Even more bizarre, now AutoCAD LT runs without any complaints. Before it failed WHIP indicating that the system was unsupported which should never have been the case.

So, it seems to me that the graphics subsystem was not being recognised correctly before the reboot and that wsa causing all of my problems. The screensaver had also stopped working being replaced by a screensaver consisting only of the text, "Quartz Composer." I expect that will also work now.

Finally, I had a very strange Numbers problem that I posted elsewhere and that is also resolved now.

Autocad .... very weird

it's all good now

Well, dang, after thinking all you AutoCAD people were crazy, I just launched and quit AutoCAD 2013, and guess what? You're not crazy at all.

What gives? Everything is now perfectly smooth. I'm not kidding. Strange.

I've been having this issue all day at work which started at lunch and i've spent an hour reading this thread before booking a Genius appointment; got to this last page and read about the "AutoCAD fix". Amazing! It works? Launch AutoCAD 2013, it's the bomb!

Had the same problem. After reading these posts I tried disabling the real time antivirus scan and safe browsing on MacKeeper and viola!--problem solved.

Hello everybody

Yesterday I installed AutoCAD 2013 and immediately had laggy animations on my mac. Now I uninstalled AutoCAD and the problem is still there. So the much more important question: How do I get the problem fixed (without launching AutoCAD)???

MBP mid-2012, i7 2.6GHz, 15"

I just fixed this problem on my rMBP without AutoCAD, and I hope what I did will be useful to some of you.

First the fix, then some details:

-- Shut down all of your apps, except Finder (which you can't shut down and don't need to.)

-- Wait a minute or two to allow your OS to do some housecleaning. If you shut down your machine right away, you'll preempt some of the housecleaning, and you'll still have the problem when you restart.

-- Shut down your Mac (don't just restart; do a full shutdown so it will be less likely to save you time by doing only a partial cleanup)

-- Wait thirty seconds or so for everything to fade from RAM (probably unnecessary, but if you don't have to do this for a lot of machines, it's not much of a burden)

-- Restart, and I hope your problem will be gone

Some details that you can skip unless you are interested:

-- I had made some adjustments in the System Preferences > Accessibility > Trackpad > Scrolling Speed to increase scrolling speed. I didn't like the jerkiness of the faster scroll, so I set it back to the original speed. I didn't notice until sometime later that all my apps now had jerky scrolling. Maybe this adjustment caused the problem. Maybe it was my experiments with drag settings. Maybe washing my car makes it rain.

-- I did a restart and still had the problem.

-- I shut down all apps except Finder and did a full shutdown. I waited and restarted. I still had the problem. And then Firefox and Terminal started up with the windows from the last session. Strange. I had quit those apps (cmd-q) before shutting down, but here they were starting themselves. It seems as though the system thought they were still running when it shut down and restored them on startup. Hmm. I wonder what else it restored for me.

-- I shut down all apps and waited a couple of minutes, giving OS X plenty of time to straighten up the place and take care of those low priority chores it had been meaning to get around to. Then I shut down, waited, restarted, and Firefox and Terminal didn't autostart. Finder did autostart, of course, and when I tried scrolling a very full directory in Finder, it was back to smooth scrolling. I restarted my other apps and scrolling remained smooth. Problem solved.

-- There are probably several things that can hobble the graphics system this way, but I hope that this procedure will clean up some of them for anyone who reads this (and maybe suggest an idea or two to Apple engineers....)

Funny to find out after a 5 page thread that we're all Autocad users... 🙂

I reported the issue and linked to this thread on the Autocad for Mac blog.

For me, after launching and quiting Autocad the problem was fixed and has not returned (24 hours). Perhaps a silent update of something somewhere broke something and launching Autocad fixed it...

Sorry for the folks who went through a clean install to fix this... :/