reesesWeb

I had previously complained about a lack of smoothness and grace with Tiger, theorising that it was the result of some performance optimisations. When triggering Expose or Dashboard, the visual transformation was very jittery, which reminded me of jump-scrolling optimisations in early xterm alternatives such as rxvt.

I just applied this hint and the smoothness is restored.

Apparently the "Beam Synchronisation" ties the Quartz display refresh rate to that of the display's vertical refresh rate, when an electron gun spray goes from the lower right to the upper left of the display. On the bright side, this means a single frame from the application is rendered as a single frame on the display, which should make things smoother in general.

Unfortunately, the Tiger implementation is b0rked, and makes things less smooth. One can change this setting through a rather gross little hack -- running Quartz Debug, disabling beam sync, and then force-quitting Quartz Debug so it does not restore the default setting, which means it will have to be done every time the machine is restarted.

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