A reduction of transparency will increase the speed of the whole OS dramatically

[airlied]

I went to system pref and then Accessibility, then I have "reduce transparency" checked, the whole system immediately went faster, even better than Mavericks.

Yosemite lags on my late 2013 Macbook pro retina 15', even when discrete graphic is on. And I think the reason is that Apple didnt do very well on optimizing the UI effects.

 

[rmercier]

Not good when using "Dark Mode" though, menu highlight makes text unreadable unless you change Appearance to Graphite, but that makes the menu item selection hard to see.

 

[n-evo]

Doubtful my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB has problems with anything OS X Yosemite throws at it. But I can imagine disabling all the transparency will increase performance on older Macs.

 

[pickaxe]

Doubtful my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB has problems with anything OS X Yosemite throws at it. But I can imagine disabling all the transparency will increase performance on older Macs.

You'd be surprised - as of current builds, Apple's optimization is ass.

Mission Control, Desktop Swiping, Full Screen transitions, Notification Center enter/exit animation... they all suffer from heavy stuttering and even massive frame drops

 

[sixkiller]

Yosemite lags on my late 2013 Macbook pro retina 15', even when discrete graphic is on. And I think the reason is that Apple didnt do very well on optimizing the UI effects.

I've got the same mac and the same problem, i did a clean install of Yosemite when I installed it, but I even had some UI lag in Mavericks, and apparently it's a very common problem as I've read on a bunch of forums and threads here, not just in Yosemite, but in Mavericks and previous OSX's too.