Exposé: a lot slower on tiger....

Lt Major Burns

Lt Major Burns

"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
i've done a clean install of tiger.

brilliant, except...

expose, and someother graphical things are a LOT slower - choppy!
expose seems to be the worst affected, but it is visibly slower. i've heard that tiger now renders everything on screen using the gpu in the graphics card. this is bad though, especially if i'm seeing choppiness and slowdown. has anyone else seen this? i've got 128mb of V-ram in my radeon 9600. this is just crap. but it is slower. is there anyway of telling it to go back to panther rendering for expose, or something? it does seem to be the only niggle i've found so far.

love the RSS screensaver (although for some reason the itunes artwork screensaver wont work as it apparently can't find any art work - most of my 11,000 songs have artwork....)
 
im seeing this too..

lots of slowdown although i have 1gb ram in my mac (1.25ghz) - sometimes it can be 30 seconds before anything happens when i click a menu, but once it gets going it seems ok

the rss screensaver is amazing too.
 
are your spotlights still doing indexing? don't call tiger names while it's still doing that...
 
I noticed the same thing when I first installed it. it seemed like i didn't have enough ram (4 gigs), things were slow and choppy.

I restarted it though and it seems to be better. it was driving me insane there for a while though. did you restart at all? the programs seem to take quite a bit longer to open though still.
 
i don't think it's indexing - it was indexing my ipod, and that was taking a while, for no reason (it's my old panther back-up, and will be deleted eventually) so i stopped it. activity monitor doesn't show anything too intensive. why is it slow?? :(
 
I've also noticed this...Spotlight has been done indexing for some time now.

1GHz TiBook
ATI 9000 64MB
1 GB ram
 
If you are going to report this problem, can you let us know what video card, RAM and processor your Mac has?

According to Arstechnica, the 2D graphics system (Quartz) has seen a massive re-design in Tiger (with the introduction of Quartz 2D Extreme) which optimises it to use VRAM (memory on the video card) to work with framebuffers and effects. The end result is 2D rendering of windows and movements that can in theory be many, many times faster than the older Quartz method, which stored framebuffers in system RAM.

The upshot, though, is that only supported video cards can take advantage of Q2DE, older cards get a significant re-think of the way they handle 2D graphics that should make them even faster yet ... even if you're on a G3-500 with an 8MB video card, you should theoretically see an improvement. But as with all changes and re-writes, there are going to be cases where the new method simply *isn't* faster.

In theory, we should see performance improvements on all Quartz Extreme supported cards (did you see how I wrote "in theory"? We won't really know until we see it in action, thoroughly tested). Here's the list:
Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and later, or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.

However, here's a list of cards that are "supported by Core Image" and therefore going to see the advantages of the new GPU optimised technology the most:
Core Image-capable graphics cards include:
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Radeon 9600 XT, 9800 XT, X800 XT
nVidia GeForce FX Go 5200
nVidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra (Fellow iMac G5 owners rejoice!)
nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL, 6800 GT DDL

These cards are going to see a big performance jump, especially in window handling, Quicktime, and all those special effects. As with all new MacOSX features, there will be small but noticable improvement in the dot-point updates.

For more info, see:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
 
Mine's really smooth. I do have a Radeon 9800 though so it's using all the hardware accelerated stuff.
 
well, i've got dual-1.8ghz g5s running with 1gb of ddr ram and a 128mb radeon 9600. it should run like a bloody dream, and if not, then it's incredibly shoddy coding - it's a £2000 machine after all.
 
Just left mine alone while indexing, saved time & patience.
No slow down in Eposé or anything else here. slightly faster if anything. (Archive & Install)
 
fryke said:
are your spotlights still doing indexing? don't call tiger names while it's still doing that...
Click to expand...

Wise words - I kind of figured this on my own, but nice to see it here. Still, Apple could make this a little more obvious with a hard to miss notification and avoid any bad first impressions!
 
Both of my systems (see sig) are noticably faster and more snappy - I suspect a number of people here are experiencing ".0 revision" bugs. I suspect whatever's causing your Quartz Extreme problems, Lt. Burns, is also causing your Quicktime problems, etc.

If so, hopefully we'll see the problems resolved sooner than later...
 
quicktime runs fine - very smooth. i just thought HD was going to be more impressive than that.... i just had too high an expectation for it

while we're on a 'Tiger destroyed my life' post, it read my short name as being my email address. which is a really stupid email address i've had since i was 14. my home folder is now "six_seconds_tom" and looks daft. is there any way to change it? i mean without doing a clean install?
 
I had similar problems, but they went away after a while. My disk kept chug-chug-chugging along for quite a while after Spotlight finished doing its indexing. I'm not sure what that was about, but I'm guessing it was the cause of the slowdown.

I've heard (ad nauseum) how Panther/Tiger automatically defragments smaller files. Perhaps this was the unseen cause of slowdown. After a whole new system install, with perhaps hundreds of thousands and files being updated and rewritten, there's bound to be some major shuffling about in order, right? Is it possible Tiger was doing that in the background? Or is that not even the way it works? I'm not sure, but it's my best theory.
 
Tiger is really sluggish on my powerbook 1.5 15 inch. This might sound like a silly question but how can I tell if spotlight is still indexing? When I click on the icon that appears in the top right it only activates a search, and I can't see anything in the spotlight menu under system preferences.

I have noticed the following after installing tiger last night:

Airport has more of a signal compared to using panther when connected to my home network.

Expose is slower

The OS boots alot faster when switching it on

When I activate icons they take a while to load up

The dock is very sluggish

Any help in determining whether spotlight is still indexing will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
If you hover your mouse over the spotlight icon, you'll get a tooltip saying Indexing... or something similar if that's the case.

The little magnifying glass also has a pulsing dot in it if I remember correctly; I did a clean install and indexing lasted about 3 minutes. Since then I've not seen it indexing.
--
Chris
www.chrisblunt.com
 
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