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Are animation effects "choppier" in Leopard than in Tiger?

Are animation effects "choppier" in Leopard than in Tiger?

  • Yes, animations were smoother in Tiger

    Votes: 110 66.7%

  • No, animations are just as smooth as they were in Tiger, if not smoother

    Votes: 55 33.3%
  • Total voters
    165
The animations work smoothly when plugged into the mains (well, sometimes it isn't quite smooth, but generally flawless).

However, when I'm running on battery, the animations are awful. Choppy, stuttery and crap.

Wish there was a way to enable full performance when running on battery (I am on high performance on energy saver but that does f. all).
 
I have definitely noticed that some animations are choppier. I thought that I was the only one! I have a brand new, C2D MacBook Pro (2.4 Ghz) with the 256 mb video card and 4 GB of Ram. The dock magnification, window minimize and dashboard are all definitely going at a much lower frame rate. In Tiger they were all like liquid.

However, some animations have been improved. In system preferences when you click a new pane is much, much smoother, as is the cube rotate for fast user switching.

I hope they fix this soon!
 
mike12806 said:
This must be an issue with the integrated graphics as I can see "Seanneko" has a macbook....:cool:
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Nope. People with MacBook Pros and Mac Pros are experiencing it. I have 2 IG Macs and one is choppy and one isn't.

Jack Dangers said:
I've just noticed the longer I use it, the better it gets.:confused:

as of this evening expose and genie animations are much better...
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I have noticed that too. Every reboot brings a little boost. My wake up from sleep use to take 3 or 4 seconds, now the login screen is up before I have lifted the MacBooks lid all the way.
 
Slow animated GIFs

For some reason animated GIFs are very slow in safari. Opening the same GIF with Camino works fine. I have a powerbook AL 1.5GHz.
 
For me, I found that VMware Fusion was somehow to blame. Even though CPU usage remained under 50%, as long as it was updating the screen somehow - e.g. playing some slowly animated GIF - random Core Anim effects were choppy. iMac Late 2006 edu, with GMA950.

I recommend starting with clean login, no apps running, and doing something that is likely to cause choppiness, like Expose/stack opening with Shift held down. Then as you start using each of your apps one by one, see when it starts. Suboptimal scheduling?
 
Veri said:
For me, I found that VMware Fusion was somehow to blame. Even though CPU usage remained under 50%, as long as it was updating the screen somehow - e.g. playing some slowly animated GIF - random Core Anim effects were choppy. iMac Late 2006 edu, with GMA950.

I recommend starting with clean login, no apps running, and doing something that is likely to cause choppiness, like Expose/stack opening with Shift held down. Then as you start using each of your apps one by one, see when it starts. Suboptimal scheduling?
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I did a clean install and it was choppy from the word go.
 
by some reason I get a choppy effect when accessing my dock "hidden mode" Other than that, expose, spaces, and dashboard run smooth. I am using a Macbook with 1gb in ram, 2.16Ghz
 
So I was visiting a friend today, who has the exact same MBP as I do, and we both now have leopard. Before I went over, I asked him if he noticed any slowdown with the effects, and he said no, everything is smooth.

I get there, and in-person, I notice all the same problems I'm having, and he's all "oh, I didn't notice that." :)

I'm going to go ahead and assume that these choppy, jerky effects exist for everyone, but they're so slight, most people aren't bothered by them. Whereas I have expose bound to my middle mouse button and hit it like it's crack. Now, I can't seem to get my fix. It makes my eyes cry :(

Not to mention the bug where if I minimize too much, my minimize function is revoked, and all the little yellow balls on all my windows get grayed out. What's that?
 
I'm very curious as to what might be causing this choppiness :confused: it seems to happen on some macs but not on others, even though they have exactly the same configuration. I'm thinking of rolling back to Tiger if nothing e.g. patch/bug fix is released by next weekend. I can't live with this choppy dock nomore :(
 
duyvan82 said:
I'm very curious as to what might be causing this choppiness :confused: it seems to happen on some macs but not on others, even though they have exactly the same configuration. I'm thinking of rolling back to Tiger if nothing e.g. patch/bug fix is released by next weekend. I can't live with this choppy dock nomore :(
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One issue to keep in mind is that not all users will consider the choppy animation a problem or even notice it at all, as Fender321's post demonstrates. So it might actually be a more widespread and recurrent problem than the reports given here would lead us to believe.

As for its cause, it most likely has to do with Core Animation. It's at least plausible that Apple rewrote the code for window animations to take advantage of the new framework. Core Animation, it would seem, doesn't perform as well as whatever method Apple used previously or it simply has not been fully optimized. Further evidence that Leopard has graphics/performance issues comes from Apple's decision to use static icons for minimized windows that contain 'live' content (e.g., videos). Presumably Apple would only make such a change out of necessity, for example, to avoid a performance hit from rendering the reflection on the Dock. Perhaps we should just be grateful that Leopard's stable.
 
One final word on this issue: I went to an Apple Store today and checked the animation performance of every computer there. All of them exhibited the same "choppiness" that I've noticed on my MacBook. So for me there's no longer any question: the animation performance in Leopard is noticeably and unequivocally worse than in Tiger.
 
I also went to the Apple store and noticed the problem on all machines. MacPro seems pretty good, however, the grid effect in the dock is still somewhat choppy and that's a very powerful machine.

I emailed Apple many times, I suggest we all do the same. I personally don't see any major things in Leopard and I loved the smoothness of Tiger, so if they don't' fix this soon, I'm going back...
 
Is it choppier? Yes. Does it affect usability? No. Would I give up the features of Leopard for slightly smoother animations in Tiger? No.
 
Noticed too

I have noticed this do from the minute I did the install. DOCK, from hide to show, genie effect seems choppy.

I did an arcihive and install.

20" CD imac.
 
Well, I did archive and install and I am on the lower end of hardware with a MDD Dual 867mhz G4, 2gb RAM, Radeon 9800 pro 128mb. During the first few boots and of course during spotlight indexing, things were not quite smooth. The one thing that was rather choppy for me was with the 3d dock w/magnification on, and since I didn't like the 3d dock as well, I enabled the 2d dock on the bottom. Everything after a few reboots is easily just a smooth as tiger for me. Actually rebooting, application launching, etc is all faster than tiger. I am really impressed with the boost I got with Leopard. Spaces when going out to the 4 view window is a little choppy, but I can't compare that to Tiger. I think overall people probably are having some of these problems, but we might be a bit too picky with all of this. I think many of these annoyances will be sorted out by 10.5.1 or .2 Don't forget: You guys are early adopters! It's the price you pay for being first. If these very minor things bother you so badly I would hate to see your reaction from upgrading from XP to Vista the day it was released. With Leopard, I expected a few problems going in.. so far I am rather impressed as I have not encountered any real show stoppers and that's a great thing. Apple delivered a very solid .0 release I say!
 
It varies, even in Tiger there were sometimes issues, but it was mostly fine, same here. I'm only on a GMA950 too, so it's not so bad.
 
esaleris said:
Is it choppier? Yes. Does it affect usability? No. Would I give up the features of Leopard for slightly smoother animations in Tiger? No.
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But it does affect usability.....everytime you click close/minimise or whatever you get annoyed....
 
It's on my iBook G4 with Radeon 9550, Cover Flow, Front Row, Stacks, and Quicklook animations are very smooth. However, the 3D Dock magnification, Expose, and Spaces are rather choppy. Expose was smooth under Tiger, and I find it strange that the Dock magnification is choppy when Cover Flow animates very smoothly.
 
Alloye said:
It must depend on hardware and/or drivers. On my 24" Al iMac, Leopard's animations are flawless.
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I have 24" Al iMac with 2.4Ghz & 2GB Ram... everything is smooth except for stacks that open as a grid.. Admittedly its a large grid with all my apps but I would rather it take half a second longer to load the icons and start the anim and be smooth than sorting itself out mid transition.
 
mrfrosty said:
But it does affect usability.....everytime you click close/minimise or whatever you get annoyed....
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I agree with that. It annoys me very much that Dashboard and Exposé are more choppy on Leopard than they were on Tiger. I have this 'problem' both on a iMac 17" C2D (X1600) and a MacBook.
 
Good to see I'm not alone... The choppy dock was the FIRST thing I noticed when installing leopard. At first I shrugged it off and thought it had to do with the fact I was running Leopard with only 1gb of RAM and off my external FW drive. So I upgraded my RAM to 3gb on my MBP C2D and did an erase and install... To my surprise I still had the choppy animations. Just Re-installed 10.4.10 and it's as smooth as butter. I'm sure this problem will get ironed out soon.
 
Thornie said:
Good to see I'm not alone... The choppy dock was the FIRST thing I noticed when installing leopard. At first I shrugged it off and thought it had to do with the fact I was running Leopard with only 1gb of RAM and off my external FW drive. So I upgraded my RAM to 3gb on my MBP C2D and did an erase and install... To my surprise I still had the choppy animations. Just Re-installed 10.4.10 and it's as smooth as butter. I'm sure this problem will get ironed out soon.
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yep yep. My MBP 2.2 is Choppy as hell, and my new Alu iMac 20" 2.4 is smooth as BUTTER on everything my MBP has issues with.

My iMac was an upgrade install whereas my MBP was an ERASE & INSTALL.

Go chew on that one for a bit.... main differences between these 2 are the GPU ATI vs Nvidia
 
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