Honestly,while not perfect in iOS 7, there was a lot less stuttering even on an iPad Air. The Air 2 smoothness with iOS 8 is equal to iOS 7 on an iPad Air last year. Not much has changed with the blurring effect. What has changed is the coding behind it. I remember reading/hearing somewhere that iOS 8 caches animations now and UI elements have been split into different sub-structures or something. So what that makes me think is that if an animation hasn't been used in a awhile it has to "reload or redraw" it, causing stuttering. Notice pulling up control center from the bottom has the ever so slight delay if you move your finger too fast, wasn't so on iOS 7. Which is why its much better and almost always smooth on the Air 2. Whats the difference? 2GB of RAM, thats what.
I'm sure theres a good reason why they made the changes but its been poorly implemented. Sure it wasn't perfect in iOS 7 but on most devices it was pretty smooth. So right now the only two devices that run iOS 8 with any type of consistent smoothness is iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2. The 6 Plus is a joke in regards to stuttering. It will go down as the iPad 3 of iPhones.
Wow. That thing with animations being cached is so stupid. That just screams inefficiency to me. Plus it may be causing the RAM to be choked more, which is not cool on a 1GB of RAM A7 iPad. Could this explain why whenever I leave an app that I have been using for awhile it typically leaves as a jumpy mess (ESPECIALLY if it's a game or a keyboard happens to be open)? Or is something wrong with my backup or something requiring a restore and set up as new? I have been planning on doing that lately anyway since things are seeming kinda cluttered and annoying. Might fix some of my issues as well. Not sure. (Takes like forever, close to 7 or 8 whole seconds at times, for my iPad mini 2 to rotate if I haven't rebooted it in a couple days, lockscreen is 2x worse and "Slide to Unlock" lags as its *trying* to rotate)
It seems like I heard way back when during the late iOS 7 or 8 betas that battery life improved a lot on iPads but on the same update UI performance dropped. Maybe it was the iOS 8 GM? I think I recall seeing a video where they described the GM as "bringing back" stuttering on their mini 2. According to them CC and NC were smooth on the lockscreen, and rotating in the App Store was smooth in beta 5, but iOS 8 GM "brought these issues back". Not sure if it's actually the case but it's something I for some reason vaguely remember it seems like.
iOS 7.1.2 on iPad Air was super smooth. The extra transparency effects on iOS 8 are taking their toll on some devices (Safari and Spotlight especially).
Hey, iOS 7.1.2 was still far from perfect. I mean, the control center and Notification Center still stuttered on the lockscreen. WHY? It's such an easy fix to make that not happen, make the slide to unlock animation and clock disappear *AS SOON* as control center starts to appear. Not three quarters of the way through, immediately. Blurring the fancy effects used on "Slide to Unlock" is probably a little challenging, because of all the intricacies in how it illuminates the text, even though it occupies a very small space, thus, not much is being blurred. Anyway, any translucent UI element combined with the keyboard caused lag back then, still does now. Same thing with rotating with a keyboard open. The entire App Store was and still is a laggy mess, yes, even with the glorified iOS 7.1.2. Translucent UI elements combined with a folder being open also caused stuttering back then, and still does now. Spotlight I remember had that huge jump with the apps coming down, they fixed this in iOS 8 by hiding it (making the apps stop at the point where they would jump
) Oh, and when you had already typed something into spotlight and you slid it down so it was putting a blurred homescreen overlay+results up, it wasn't especially smooth I remember. Now, it directly blurs the content rather than throwing an overlay on top. Both cases are still stuttery though. Fun.
Oh and blurring into Siri never was really very smooth either, still sorta has issues though. However it's gotten better it seems gradually since 7.0, so I will take it. Almost good on homescreen. I could list more but I already have described more than enough stutter instances existent on both iOS 7.1.2 and iOS 8.1.3
