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OSX Lion - poor graphic performance!
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OS X Lion Poor Graphics Performance
I installed Lion on an early 2008 iMac (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM & 128MB Radeon HD 2400 XT) and the graphics performance is terrible. Animations don't seem like they should be any more intensive than many of the ones in Snow Leopard, but they're all jittery in Lion. The user switching animation is slow and sits with a white/gray screen for a few seconds after doing the rotating cube animation to the login screen, the Launchpad animation skips frames, iPhoto performs terribly, and all video is choppy (QuickTime, DVD Player, Preview, Flash, Silverlight, DivX, etc). Spotlight has completely indexed the drive and no backups are running. I've done a complete disk check and file permissions repair while in recovery mode. Nothing helps. What gives? Any other suggestions? I really don't want to have to do a complete clean install, especially since Lion makes it more difficult to do.
I installed Lion on an early 2008 iMac (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo w/ 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM & 128MB Radeon HD 2400 XT) and the graphics performance is terrible. Animations don't seem like they should be any more intensive than many of the ones in Snow Leopard, but they're all jittery in Lion. The user switching animation is slow and sits with a white/gray screen for a few seconds after doing the rotating cube animation to the login screen, the Launchpad animation skips frames, iPhoto performs terribly, and all video is choppy (QuickTime, DVD Player, Preview, Flash, Silverlight, DivX, etc). Spotlight has completely indexed the drive and no backups are running. I've done a complete disk check and file permissions repair while in recovery mode. Nothing helps. What gives? Any other suggestions? I really don't want to have to do a complete clean install, especially since Lion makes it more difficult to do.
OS X Lion Poor Graphics Performance
I have exactly the same problem (I happen to have the same imac and have tried the same fixes to no avail) and I would greatly appreciate any help.
Open terminal and change to the Silver Aerogel theme. Drag the window around. Do you get really jerky movement?
I'm on a macbook with x3100 graphics; it was really shockingly bad. I reformatted and did a clean install of Lion. Now much much better. I'd guesstimate that it's gone from 0.5 frame/sec to probably 15 f/s. Whole system has smoother animations too.
Suppose a setting or 3rd party bit of software had messed something up.
I'm on a macbook with x3100 graphics; it was really shockingly bad. I reformatted and did a clean install of Lion. Now much much better. I'd guesstimate that it's gone from 0.5 frame/sec to probably 15 f/s. Whole system has smoother animations too.
Suppose a setting or 3rd party bit of software had messed something up.
how? Nothing personal but it really gets on my nerves when somebody posts 'solved' without posting the solution.
^^Yeah, what you said. VERY annoying.
Anywho, same issues on my early 2007 MBP, 2.16 C2D that has (I believe), the ATI X1600 vid card. Never used to have issues playing 1080p .mkv files, but now, in both VLC & MPlayerX, lots of video/audio syncing issues as well as flat-out degraded, choppy video when playing hi rez video.
Solved half of my problem...
It's very clear for me that Lion got some memory issues (it really doesn't work well with less than 4Gb of ram installed) and video issues. If you're using some of the more powerful GPUs, this can pass you by. But if you're using some of the older models, it'll get you. For me, I have a MB Pro (2.26 with 6Gb of ram) and it works fine. But at home, i use a MB 2.16 with 3 Gb of Ram just to play videos on my TV and in this MB I'm experiencing some video lag (specially in VLC or XBMC playing mkv 720p or 1080p videos).
What did solve most of this problem was to do the following:
1st, I repaired the permissions on my system's disk.
2nd, (forgive me about the names cause mine is in brazilian portuguese) go to Control Panel > Spotlight > Privacy. Include your system's disk on the list (this will tell lion to not index the disk for searches). Reboot. After the reboot, you can remove it from the list (so your Spotlight searches will work again). This will force Lion to rebuild the disks index.
It really got my videos playing.
I can't say this is the solution, cause the video performance still got some minor lags when too much is moving and the video is in fullscreen, but you will surely see the difference!
It's very clear for me that Lion got some memory issues (it really doesn't work well with less than 4Gb of ram installed) and video issues. If you're using some of the more powerful GPUs, this can pass you by. But if you're using some of the older models, it'll get you. For me, I have a MB Pro (2.26 with 6Gb of ram) and it works fine. But at home, i use a MB 2.16 with 3 Gb of Ram just to play videos on my TV and in this MB I'm experiencing some video lag (specially in VLC or XBMC playing mkv 720p or 1080p videos).
What did solve most of this problem was to do the following:
1st, I repaired the permissions on my system's disk.
2nd, (forgive me about the names cause mine is in brazilian portuguese) go to Control Panel > Spotlight > Privacy. Include your system's disk on the list (this will tell lion to not index the disk for searches). Reboot. After the reboot, you can remove it from the list (so your Spotlight searches will work again). This will force Lion to rebuild the disks index.
It really got my videos playing.
I can't say this is the solution, cause the video performance still got some minor lags when too much is moving and the video is in fullscreen, but you will surely see the difference!
Yes, switching Terminal to the Silver Aerogel theme causes it to be jerky when I move the window around. This, despite the fact that I finally just did a completely clean install of Lion. Although that certainly did help most things perform better, there are still a number of system animations that are choppy, as well as full-screen video, and QuickLook on HD video files (which play fine in QuickTime). I think they're addressing some of these poor graphics issues with 10.7.2 in the next couple weeks.
I hope they are going to. I don't hold out much hope though. I remember having a GMA 900 macbook and a X3100 one, the transitions were so much smoother on the 900. Must be ****** drivers, since AFAIK the 3100 is a better chip.