[htilonom]

It's that fucking applegraphicspowermanagement.kext !! I'm not even kidding with that kext name. If you delete the kext, repair caches and reboot you'll see 10x better and smoother animations.

More about kext itself; it contains the list of supported graphics cards (poor one) and power states for them. Some states are badly done even with supported graphics cards. I had a lot fun with this kext back in the ole' days after Intel switch.

[blkhp19]

Can you provide a source / more information on this solution? Surely there are drawbacks. And you mention using this solution back in the day - are you sure it's still applicable?

[htilonom]

This is coming from Hackintosh scene, but I've had enourmous improvements on real Macs as well, which includes Macbook Pro, Air and Mac Pro (not latest gens).

Easiest way is to make backup of applegraphicspowermanagement.kext or just rename it to applegraphicspowermanagement.kext.bak and then rebuild you cache with app like Kext Utility.

Only drawback I see is that graphics card will now use native power management and not Mac OS one. One thing I've noticed, applegraphicspowermanagement.kext has list of graphics cards, so if your card is not identified it appears that generic power / sleep states are being used thus producing glitches.

A bit more about power / sleep states. You've probably noticed that when you have certain animation first time in OS X, it is choppy, but second and third time it's animated perfectly. That's where applegraphicspowermanagement.kext is messing up the states. You can try it on Launchpad or Mission Control animations.

Here's more info on the issue, it's for nvidias but it applies to every graphics cards although ATI is generally more supported on OS X.

http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit-app...