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How I fixed choppy Spaces in Snow Leopard


31 August, 2009 (14:03) Posted by Oli | , ,

It took a lot of Googling, but I finally came across a post on MacRumors’ forums from back when Leopard came out. It seems this is a common problem with Apple’s .0 releases !

Basically, you need to run Quartz Debug. Next, go to Tools, then ‘Show Beam Sync Tools.  When the new window pops up, turn the option off and you’re good to go.
What this does is turn off Vsync, which makes sense as I’d been saying it was refresh rate related all day ! Go me !
Here’s a video of it in action – thanks to Snow Leopard’s built in screen capturing tool.  It’s smoother than the video makes it look too.
Once you’ve made the changes, FORCE QUIT the app to save.



The only downside to this is you MAY notice some screen tearing. It’s not awful, and to me it’s definitely preferable to the choppiness !
Please remember to Digg/Tweet or whatever you do to spread the word !

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Comments

Comment from Christopher Speer
Time: September 6, 2009, 10:25 pm

Thank you very very much!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10142190#10142190

Comment from Oli
Time: September 7, 2009, 11:14 am

@Christopher Speer Glad it helped ! It’s not ideal I know, but it’s better than the poor animations before.

Comment from Kevling
Time: September 21, 2009, 10:11 am

I’m getting really choppy DVD playback on my Mac Mini, trying this out to see if it helps.

Comment from Oli
Time: September 21, 2009, 10:25 am

@Kevling – Interesting. What machine is that on ? There seems to be some problem with graphics acceleration on certain machines. I hoped 10.6.1 would fix in but it appears not.

Pingback from Rjesenje trzavih Spacesa… « iQuadMachine
Time: October 11, 2009, 2:51 am

[...] Ovdje ima malo detaljnije kako se to radi [...]

Comment from Montana Man
Time: December 11, 2009, 5:37 pm

This really helps, thanks! Although doing a force quit isn’t saving the setting here. (running 10.6.2) I take it that works for you?

Comment from Oli
Time: December 11, 2009, 5:49 pm

@Montana Man – Glad this is helping! I don’t do it anymore as I got tired of doing it after every reboot. I think I just got used to it to be honest. I was hoping it would be fixed by now, but it seems I was asking too much :(

Comment from Maradona
Time: February 15, 2010, 1:26 am

This is rather annoying issue for me too! Thanks for all the tipps in the post.

MAc Mini 2009 here and having this issue. Tell me, when you minimize windows to the dock, say 4 or 5, is Expose choppy for you, as well? Is the SHOW ALL WINDOWS animation not there when you invoke it?

For me as soon as I minimize 4 windows to the dock the Expose animation SHOW ALL is simply not there… The graphic issues with SL and Nvidia chipsets are truly annoying.

Hope you all submitted a report to Apple!

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