Dock Magnification not as smooth in 3D

[wankey]

I have a Macbook Pro with a 8600GT, my dock magnification in 3D isn't smooth (lags behind the mouse a little and is choppy) whilst in 2D is completely smooth.

To add insult to injury, my friend's Macbook Unibody with 9400m has uber smooth dock magnification in 3D and my friend's macbook pro unibody has the same.

Why does my 8600GT which is supposedly just as fast as a 9600GT and mch faster than a 9400m so mind numbingly slow? Thanks.

 

[edgew8]

I have a Macbook Pro with a 8600GT, my dock magnification in 3D isn't smooth (lags behind the mouse a little and is choppy) whilst in 2D is completely smooth.

To add insult to injury, my friend's Macbook Unibody with 9400m has uber smooth dock magnification in 3D and my friend's macbook pro unibody has the same.

Why does my 8600GT which is supposedly just as fast as a 9600GT and mch faster than a 9400m so mind numbingly slow? Thanks.

I can only noobishly speculate and say that the drivers for the 9400m are better, maybe.

 

[wankey]

I can only noobishly speculate and say that the drivers for the 9400m are better, maybe.

Yeah I can only do that noobish speculation as well. Here's to hoping for better drivers. I'm kinda downed by the fact that my awesome 8600GT-awesomeness is slower than my friend's silly 9400m

 

[edgew8]

Yeah I can only do that noobish speculation as well. Here's to hoping for better drivers. I'm kinda downed by the fact that my awesome 8600GT-awesomeness is slower than my friend's silly 9400m

Did you update to 10.5.6. I heard that smooths out a lot of choppiness in Leopard. Also, have you compared your "smoothness" levels with coverflow and expose?

 

[wankey]

Coverflow has been hugely improved but other than that everything remained the same. Safari felt faster but crashed more.

 

[The Flashing Fi]

Do you have the wallpaper switcher enabled? On my MBP with a 8600m GT, I've found that it makes everything lag. I've gone to an Apple Store and found the same problem on other MBPs. It's always the same, and I'm surprised that Apple hasn't fixed it. It works great in Tiger and if you disable the 3d dock and the translucent menu bar, the wallpaper switcher works great.

 

[wankey]

Do you have the wallpaper switcher enabled? On my MBP with a 8600m GT, I've found that it makes everything lag. I've gone to an Apple Store and found the same problem on other MBPs. It's always the same, and I'm surprised that Apple hasn't fixed it. It works great in Tiger and if you disable the 3d dock and the translucent menu bar, the wallpaper switcher works great.

Wallpaper switcher? How do I disable?

 

[edgew8]

Wallpaper switcher? How do I disable?

system preferences/ Desktop & screensaver / Desktop, there should be a checkbox near the bottom that asks if you want to change the wallpaper every X minutes. make sure it is unchecked. I am betting it already is tho...you would have noticed your wallpaper changing all by itself already

 

[The Flashing Fi]

system preferences/ Desktop & screensaver / Desktop, there should be a checkbox near the bottom that asks if you want to change the wallpaper every X minutes. make sure it is unchecked. I am betting it already is tho...you would have noticed your wallpaper changing all by itself already

Yeah.

Asides from disabling eye candy, there's not much anyone can do. I have at times contemplated putting Tiger back on my MBP, if only it wasn't for Stacks and Time Machine.

 

[avihappy]

Yeah I can only do that noobish speculation as well. Here's to hoping for better drivers. I'm kinda downed by the fact that my awesome 8600GT-awesomeness is slower than my friend's silly 9400m

If it somehow makes you feel better, my older MBP with an ATI X1600 performs dock magnification perfectly. Perhaps you should try resetting the dock settings by deleting the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist file. You will lose all customizations to the dock like this. It may help...

Also, are you sure you have the Leopard Graphics Update installed?

 

[FSMBP]

Yeah, to the original poster - I always noticed the SAME THING when I got my Macbook Pro with the 8600.

The Dock animation and sometimes Dashboard wasn't smooth as can be (even with all updates and on 10.5.6)

I guess we might have to wait til Snow Leopard for any hope

 

[macrem]

Dock has ALWAYS been smooth for me, on both much older versions of OS X running on a TiBook and with Leopard running on an old PPC machine. There must be another factor.

 

[Sirobin]

Dock has ALWAYS been smooth for me, on both much older versions of OS X running on a TiBook and with Leopard running on an old PPC machine. There must be another factor.

Yeah, the dock on my Powerbook is buttery smooth, so there is definitely something up.

 

[The Flashing Fi]

Dock has ALWAYS been smooth for me, on both much older versions of OS X running on a TiBook and with Leopard running on an old PPC machine. There must be another factor.

Yeah, crappy drivers from Apple for the 8600M GT. Other people have complained of various lag at various times with it.

 

[lordthistle]

The 9400 is much smoother than the 9600 on any 2D system animation (obviously on my 2.4 GHz Unibody MBP). The 8600 on my previous penryn MBP was better than 9400 (or 9600) in everything. For example, on this unibody MBP the performance on google earth is simply disgusting (worse than MB with Intel GPUs).

 

[kolax]

Core Animation has its days - sometimes it is smooth, others choppy.

I experience both worlds daily. Right now, I'm playing TW2008 and everything is smooth. Other times when I'm doing nothing, it'll be choppy.

 

[268144]

probably things like wallpaper switcher or using a program like wallsaver (setting a screensaver as your wallpaper), i get lag on my macbook (crappy intel gfx) when i have either of these on, but without its perfect.

but it does suck though, i would expect the 8600GT to perform good even with those functions on.

 

[Catfish_Man]

Core Animation has its days - sometimes it is smooth, others choppy.

I experience both worlds daily. Right now, I'm playing TW2008 and everything is smooth. Other times when I'm doing nothing, it'll be choppy.

My understanding (apparently this is confirmable with OpenGL Driver Monitor, but I don't know much about the GL tools) is that most lag of this sort is due to VRAM paging. More VRAM, or less open windows, would help.

 

[The Flashing Fi]

Well, it's weird. I have Windows 7 beta, which has a wallpaper switcher that's pretty much exactly like the one's in Mac OS X, and it works flawlessly. It doesn't lag up aero or anything (I'm quite impressed). And I'm only using the stock drivers that Windows loaded for the video card.

 

[macrem]

Yeah, crappy drivers from Apple for the 8600M GT. Other people have complained of various lag at various times with it.

But its smooth for me with this 8600M GT too. How could it be smooth for me, not for others, but no other factor is at play?

 

[eXan]

OSX's gui elements' performance puzzles me as well.

3D Dock is smooth on MacBook with Intel GMA 950, but is slightly choppy and laggy on iMac G5 with Radeon 9600. Confusing, considering that the Radeon is roughly 4 times faster than GMA950.

 

[wankey]

Anyone with Snow Leopard can say that this issue is now gone?