Leopard sluggish GUI

[G5-PowerLifter]

Sorry for maybe opening to many threads, but I couldn't really find any other which is similar to my "problem.

Since I got back into PPC Computing, I've discovered several "anomalies" with PowerPC Macs and the GUI animations of OS X Leopard. For example, I currently run a Dual 2GHz first Gen. Power Mac G5 with a Radeon 9600 64MB installed. As well as an iMac G5 2GHz with another Radeon and 120MB of VRam. And when I draw back open windows from the dock the animation is pretty sluggish, while whole OS is very snappy, these animations especially on the minimising effect remain very "frame droppy". Like if you would run it on a card that doesn't even support Quartz Extreme. It is actually even worse on the Power Mac with less VRam than on the iMac. Once, I upgraded the Card to a Geforce 6600GT, which seemed to solve that laggy GUI but I ended up reinstalling the Radeon cause the NVidia card is simply too loud and "Sauerbraten" (the game, not the food) is crashing on higher settings.

Now to my point, I also have a nice little 12" PowerBook G4 in use, which has an NVidia card on board, also with just 64MB VRam, it is the only G4 computer I have in use and everthing is smooth and snappy, the entire OS (with the sierra theme installed) feels just like on a modern Mac. I also hooked the PowerBook up to a 20" Cinema display, and everything remained the same in terms of smooth animation. So the screen resolution doesn't seem to be the issue. And now I'm wondering, is it a G5 specific problem or just crappy drivers? I remember when I owned a G5 Quad (around 7 years ago) the GUI was also kinda lacking. As far as I can tell, Intel based Macs never had a problem with that, even that old 2007 MacBook with (urgh..) Intel GMA ,that my family is using, always ran smooth on Snow Leopard / Lion and it still does.

Has anyone else encountered a similar issue, or is that PowerBook just something special? Or was Apple so angry at the G5 after the switch that they decided: "okay fellers let's make Leopard run as ugly as possible on all those G5 Macs, to show the world how great our new Intels are and how peeved we're at IBM for not delivering a mobile G5!"? I mean even a Geforce 3 is better than these old Intel onboard snails.

 

[eyoungren]

Might want to look through here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-leopard-speed-improvements.1723868/

But off the top of my head.

Turn off all the eye candy: Transparent menu bar, icon previews, etc.

Using Onyx, make the display of sheets Very Fast.

Install the Secrets prefpane to turn off junk you don't need (just be careful).

Also, Shadowkiller is a great app to kill Finder window dropshadows which frees up RAM.

Lastly, there's been at least one known user experience where reinstalling Leopard helped.

I know you were asking for ONE SPECIFIC thing but checking this stuff out may help towards that.

 

[G5-PowerLifter]

Might want to look through here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-leopard-speed-improvements.1723868/

But off the top of my head.

Turn off all the eye candy: Transparent menu bar, icon previews, etc.

Using Onyx, make the display of sheets Very Fast.

Install the Secrets prefpane to turn off junk you don't need (just be careful).

Also, Shadowkiller is a great app to kill Finder window dropshadows which frees up RAM.

Lastly, there's been at least one known user experience where reinstalling Leopard helped.

I know you were asking for ONE SPECIFIC thing but checking this stuff out may help towards that.

Thanks for the reply.

The thing is, all of my leopard installations aren't even two month old. And how is it possible that one tiny G4 PowerBook is smooth without using any Eye Candy Killers. That is what bugs me. I use Onyx on all of my Macs for optimisation, but only once to get rid of eye candy. And that was on a G4 cube under Tiger. A very low end system. But none of those G5s were actually low end when Leopard came out, so why is it slow? And why do intel macs don't suffer from that (okay with intel gma some other animations were also stuttering, but never basic effects like maximising and minimising a window.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks for the reply.

The thing is, all of my leopard installations aren't even two month old. And how is it possible that one tiny G4 PowerBook is smooth without using any Eye Candy Killers. That is what bugs me. I use Onyx on all of my Macs for optimisation, but only once to get rid of eye candy. And that was on a G4 cube under Tiger. A very low end system. But none of those G5s were actually low end when Leopard came out, so why is it slow? And why do intel macs don't suffer from that (okay with intel gma some other animations were also stuttering, but never basic effects like maximising and minimising a window.

IDK. I've got a G4/400mhz with 256mb ram running Leopard and there's been no issues. Granted, it's headless (no video card) and I connect to it via VNC and only use it as a print server. But still, I do use it on occasion to do things.

Back when it was a full production PC running on a Rage 128 with 1.75GB of ram it still didn't have issues - graphically.

Maybe your video card as you thought?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Owning numerous Macs, I've finally accepted that there differences between them that make no sense. However, with regard to your particular problem, in the past I have noticed that a 64MB GPU is a little sluggish compared to a 128MB card in a Powermac G5.
I've also had groggy Leopard performance from a fresh install cured by installing again.

 

[G5-PowerLifter]

IDK. I've got a G4/400mhz with 256mb ram running Leopard and there's been no issues. Granted, it's headless (no video card) and I connect to it via VNC and only use it as a print server. But still, I do use it on occasion to do things.

Back when it was a full production PC running on a Rage 128 with 1.75GB of ram it still didn't have issues - graphically.

Maybe your video card as you thought?

I know that the Rage 128 doesn't support any of Mac OS' graphic acceleration abilities hence why I upgraded (back then) to a GeForce MX (I believe that was the name) with 32Mb of vram on my G4 cube. But OS X Tiger is not as choppy as Leopard anyway

 

[AmazingHenry]

Here is a collection of AppleScripts I made a while ago. Turn on the 2D dock, turn off Spotlight and Dashboard (all included as separate AppleScripts), and turn off the transparent menu bar as well (in Sys. Prefs. or Secrets Pref Pane). Also, here is a post I wrote awhile ago with some Terminal commands that speed up Leopard (and especially the graphics) alot. Take a look at both of these links and let me know what the results are in terms of speed.

 

[G5-PowerLifter]

Well I knew most of these tweaks before anyway, but I always enabled, or in the case of BeamSynch, disabled it via Quartz Debug App. But I always ended up enabling it again because it caused some ugly artifacts when I was moving windows around. Strange enough, when I used your terminal command to disable BeamSynch it did not cause any negative artifacts what so ever and it really sped up the entire OS on my iMac G5. Apart from youtube (I used that NinjaKit trick for that) it really feels like a modern machine now. Pretty awesome thanks alot for that! Also my PowerBook is even nicer on he internet now, it loads the web pages faster without BeamSynch (it doesn't support QuartzGL). My PowerMac G5 remains choppy though. I just need to get a Radeon X800XT for it, or I put a differnt cooler on my Geforce 6600, that card just sounds just horrendous, it's even louder than the entire system itself.