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there used to be a myth that lowering graphical quality would increase performance on Windows, I realise that this was more myth than fact, but I wondered if it was possible to actually do this on OS X, i.e. turn off as many graphical effects as possible.

I really only want to use the machine for development and i don't need all these graphical bells and whistles. I'd really like to adjust for performance as much as possible.

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While there are some graphical tweaks you can do to remove the bells and whistles, on Mac OS X and Windows Vista/7, they hardly save much compute cycles as they are now extensively handled by the GPU.

If you do want to turn off some effects,, such as the Dock's Genie effect for example, you can download Secrets or use Onyx to do the tweaks.

Also, you can disable Dashboard to free up memory and compute cycles, which is what I do.

As an added note: nowadays effects are subtle and actually serves as visual cues to let the user know what is going on.

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    Dashboard is a HUGE hog, definitely disable it Apr 8, 2012 at 17:44
  • thanks, i probably asked the wrong question, what i should have asked is how do i streamline OS X for development. is there anything else i could do apart from disabling Dashboard?
    – warsong
    Apr 8, 2012 at 18:32
  • Mac OS X is quite streamlined and there's nothing much further you could do - what IDE are you using?
    – caliban
    Apr 9, 2012 at 1:56
  • I tend not to use IDEs, i prefer a programmers text editor like Textmate.
    – warsong
    Apr 9, 2012 at 7:41
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    Lol a hardcore programmer. Actually if you are using an older Mac, you could step down OS X version - some progs I know refuse to move from Leopard or Tiger. They claim it's more lightweight.
    – caliban
    Apr 9, 2012 at 11:06

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