Users of iMacs with GeForce GT 120/130 face problems with system animations

iMacOne more problem is affecting a considerable number of iMac users, this time connected to two models of NVIDIA video cards: the GeForce GT 120 and 130. The reader Danilo Vilela, which has given us details of this and is also being affected, reports jointly with many other people that your iMac has a serious problem when rendering and displaying Mac OS X animations.

The problem affects features such as Dashboard, Expos, Spaces and even the Dock (in the Stacks), whose animations show an extremely slow behavior, which some users claim not to have noticed even in MacBooks with Intel GPUs. But the worst is not this: some users can play heavy games (like Call of Duty 4) perfectly, while less complex animations with the batteries opening and closing in the Dock behave horribly.

So, one of the suspicions for the cause of this abnormal behavior may be in the 2D libraries of Mac OS X, which may contain some incompatibility with problematic GPUs in achieving hardware acceleration for more complex tasks. The graphical interface of the Apple system, by nature, is an area that already uses many technologies to provide a work environment that increases the productive value of users, but he would need corrections in his next update to resolve this.

Another explanation I found on the subject indicates that this is an interoperability problem between the system and the graphics hardware, which is not active for operations at all times. Tests have shown that the response of the video card only increases after some operations are performed repeatedly, such as opening the Dashboard several times or doing it together with another application that uses graphics intensively, such as the iTunes viewer.

In this case, Apple will also be in charge of providing some similar graphic firmware updates released for ATI GPUs last month, which will resolve this Mac OS X incompatibility with GeForce GT 120 and 130. Judging that none of them suffer from problems with OpenGL in games, the possibilities of dealing with something serious related to hardware are reduced, fortunately.