Slow graphics performance - login screen, launchpad, full screen video all stutter

Question

Since installing Mavericks, I've found that several system animations are slow/stutter. This is on a 2012 MacBook Air with maxed out hardware specs so its not b/c I'm running an old system.
Some examples:
- When booting up, right before I reach the login screen, the display quickly flashes blue. This leads me to believe something funky is going on with my graphics card/drivers
- The login animation, where you click your username and it floats to the middle of the screen so you can type in your password, is very jerky, taking 2+ seconds to complete. Previously it had been fast and smooth
- When using Launchpad, expanding folders often takes several seconds. The folder will start to expand, freeze, and then finally finish. This tends to be more of a problem for folders with 1 row of icons. Large folders oddly seem to expand ok / smoothly
- Watching full screen video in iTunes causes the audio to stutter (the video playback is still smooth). If I make the window smaller, audio and video playback are smooth again
Is anyone else experiencing these kinds of graphics issues? Any idea whats going on or how to fix?

Answer 1

Quit Chrome and see whether there's any change. If not, see below.
Step 1
When you notice the problem, launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the icon grid.
Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.
Select All Processes from the View menu or the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.
Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for User, System, andIdle at the bottom of the window.
Select the Memory tab. What value is shown in the bottom part of the window for Swap used?
Next, select the Disk tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)
Step 2
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combinationcommand-C. Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.