Stuttery Animations

[penguintri]

Has anybody noticed that some animations are actually more stuttery on Mountain Lion? On my 2011 13in 1.7Ghz (Intel HD3000) Macbook Air all the animations are very smooth except 4 finger swiping between spaces.

This seems to be caused by the dock, as if I hide the dock or change the dock to a 2d dock, then animations are smooth again. This is also affected by the size of the dock. If the dock is long, whether by having lots of applications or enlarging the icons the stuttering is much worse that if the dock only occupies a portion of the bottom of the screen.

This is however doesn't happen at all on Lion and the animations are smooth with any size 3d dock.

 

[nebrot]

Interesting. The past days I have been searching for informations of how ML performs on a 2011 (i7) Air. Actually there are plenty threads already for Lion with Choppy annimations. Example: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1397054/ I got those myself under Lion, it irritates me a little these days due to the fact that my feeling is it got worse the past weeks. Therefore I was looking for details on it for ML. There are plenty other threads here, some say it performs a lot better due to graphics acceleration, some say it is the same or worse. There is one group saying it must be a clean installation, others say it doesn´t matter just upgrade. For the time being I´m actually confused on this and may want to show it to Apple in a store. I´m a light user and I did not install many App´s, with 160Gb free there should be enough performance on my 2011 i7.

 

[bogatyr]

Even with the dock on the side (2D) I still get some choppiness. I also get artifacts and other graphic glitches on occasion too. This is on a 2011 MBA.

Sometimes when going into Mission Control, some windows don't show up, they just have a thin white vertical line where they should be and empty space.

Also if I use a transparency theme on Terminal and it is over top of another window (like Xcode), moving the mouse over it can cause a cross weave glitch around the cursor.

I think the HD 3000 driver could use some tweaking.

 

[mabaker]

This has been a known issue that has been there at least since Leopard introduced the ski 3D dock. It's a pity Apple did not sort this out by now.

On a side note, I bet the 320m in the 2010 Mac Airs will be just fine since it has more polished drivers.

 

[penguintri]

Yea lets hope the HD3000 driver gets an update soon. Think I might move back to Lion until it gets sorted as my Air runs much smoother on Lion.