Yosemite choppy exposé

Nice one

I can not confirm that increasing the contrast makes the choppiness completely go away. It is indeed making it a lot better after activating the checkbox (which may be the case because it automatically reduces the transparency effects too), but after a while the choppiness returns. So it is no solution for me but thanks anyway for the hint 😟

And alsoYosemite looks kind of ugly with this option enabled. So my preferred approach at this moment is to disable the mission control animations all along. defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0

OSX looses a lot of its appeal by doing this, but at least it is not as annoying as all those choppy animations.

Volkward

I confirm that, When I check the 'increase contrast' checkbox for few seconds choppiness is fixed but then it again returns and it again goes away when I uncheck the 'increase contrast' option. The problem started when I switch off the external monitor mirroring but the problem persists even after I switched on mirroring. Also I could see memory leak after this incident now I couldn't run multiple apps as I used to run previously.

Hey Guys,

still no real solution, but some additional findings I'd like to share with you on our common problem.

I noticed some time ago that when I change the screen resolution for my iMac and the external display to a value different from the standard settings, everything gets much smoother.

But of course it's not an option to work with a lower resolution than the physical resolution of the display. So I just tried out a 3rd party tool for setting the screen resolution: SwitchResX. And what can I say, Mission Control got much smoother when SwitchResX is active with the native resolution of the displays.

If I additionally reduce the transparency effects of Yosemite, the animations are absolutely smooth! There are some hiccups from time to time and also one time, it got totally choppy again. But in that case, stopping and restarting the SwitchResX service was enough to make it smooth again.

I cannot explain this behavior and I don't know if this finally fixes the problem for me, but for the moment I'm very happy with this workaround.

If you like to try it, SwitchResX is available as Shareware so you don't need to buy it for testing: http://www.madrau.com

Maybe there are other programs like this wich also help. If you find one, let me know 🙂

Volkward

I can contribute to this thread and say that I've been having the same problem ever since I installed Yosemite, and even back during Mavericks though to a lesser degree. Sure enough I have a second monitor, and as long as it's connected, everything gets slow the longer OS X is running.

Changing the display contrast setting didn't make any difference for me, but *for some reason* turning on the "Increase contrast" suddenly made things silky smooth. It's very odd, because the moment I turn it off, things get choppy again. Clearly this setting disables some of the translucency effects in Yosemite, but I can't imagine that on its own explains it, because I have a high end graphics card, and with "Increase contrast" turned off everything is silky smooth right after I boot up OS X, even when there's lots of apps running. It's just that a few hours after it starts up things get very slow again.

I'll also try giving SwitchRes X a try like Volkward suggested to see if I can finagle things into working better.

Yep. worked on mine as well.

Logging out and back in will also fix the lagging, but it will eventually come back. I experience it on my external display (which I use when Macbook is closed), and also on my Macbook after awhile.

This also happened with previous versions of Mac OS too (Maverick's at least, possibly earlier too). But it's definitely the worst in Yosemite.

I have a Macbook Pro 2011.

A new hope...

... is coming with El Capitan. Craig clearly said "Mission Control is smoother in El Capitan" and with all the other performance improvements and the introduction of Metal for OS X I sincerely hope, we will at least see some improvement of our current situation.

I am eager to see the hardware requirements for Metal though. El Capitan is supported on any Mac that is able to run Yosemite, but is this also true for Metal?

Well, in a few months we will know 🙂

Volkward

After playing a while with the El Capitan Beta yesterday, I'm truly confident that the problem will be finally solved with the upcoming version of OS X 🙂

I tested it for about 3 hours, which is definitively enough for Mission Control in Yosemite to get choppy. In El Capitan: No choppy animations at all even directly after waking the Mac from standby and with 12+ windows open including mail, Photoshop, Coda, iTunes... It gets a little bit less smoother depending on the amount of open windows, but not choppy. That's all that matters to me.

So I'll keep my fingers crossed that it stays this way in the release version and it will also work for all of you guys 🙂

Volkward

Yes, I did it. Increasing contrast solves the lag on expose. Thanks.

With the public release of OS X El Capitan, the problem does not exist anymore for me. Everything is buttery smooth even with transparency active and many windows open.

Just hope it's the same for you guys 🙂

Volkward