Fix lagging display performance on retina MacBook Pro

2013-01-21

This weekend my Mac suddenly started behaving strangely: moving windows around occurred with a nearly psychodelic delay, mission control (aka exposé) was “jerky”, and scrolling was not fun. Forcing the graphics card to the discrete NVIDIA GT 650 instead of integrated Intel GPU sped things up, but the overall experience still didn’t feel right. Since the onset was sudden I immediately though: imminent hardware failure! But thankfully that turned out not to be the case.

Scouring forums for answers led me here, which worked for me!. The basic idea: delete some preferences files and reset the PRAM:

Delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist
Delete ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver*.plist
Shutdown OSX
Startup, immediately press and hold the P and R keys while holding down the option (⌥) and command (⌘) keys before the gray boot screen appears, which resets the PRAM
You may have to reset your display preferences (resolution) once you login
Done!