OS X and Linux with X11 or even Wayland are easily 20 years behind windows in terms of UI responsiveness and snappiness. The constant input lag of unix desktops always drives me back to windows for my workstations, although I am a fullheart windows server hater and despite everything that comes with it. It's stable, extremely fast and when edited/hacked right also privacy aware.
I use a mac alongside a win10 machine, with the win10 being brand new i7 hardware with ddr4 ram. And OSX's UI is far far snappier and hangs quite a bit less. My win10 machine often will just hang for no reason at all for a few seconds, then pop up whatever I had switched to.
Which GPU are you using? I have a 2015 Mac Pro with two D500, before I had a mid tear iMac. The mac pro stands directly besides my "beast" a i7 6700, titan x, nvm custom machine.
I can't really describe it, but it's bothering me and I would put my hand in a fire betting that it's somehow measurable. It feels like the input lag of a cheap IPS-Monitor. Every klick, every slide, every window resize has this minimum lag of maybe 10 to 50 ms, worse on linux. That's hardware independent, because that was already bothering me with a MacBook Pro and my old iMac. I haven't booted OSX in years to work production because of that tbh (Every piece of apple hardware I own is booted 99% of the time with Arch or W10E) but did it just now and compared it side to side. It's still there. It's driving me crazy. I know that I am hyper sensitive for lags and stuttering because of my former quake carrier.
I have replicated this by cmd-tab'ing to a cold app window. But if I just tab between say messages and firefox, I can't detect even the tiniest pause. If I click on a new tab in firefox, I see the tab add button color change instantly even if the tab takes 50ms to open.
On my beast Win10 machine, everything is also instant, it's just randomly throughout the day, it will lock up while tabbing to an app or something for 10 seconds.....which is just so weird and annoying. CPU shows it is pegging a thread for the opening app, doing who knows what.
Microsoft has comprehensively undone any progress they had here; windows 8 and beyond are a sludgy, slow, unresponsive mess owing in part to their incomprehensible reimplementation of much of the user shell in XAML.
OS X and Linux with X11 or even Wayland are easily 20 years behind windows in terms of UI responsiveness and snappiness. The constant input lag of unix desktops always drives me back to windows for my workstations, although I am a fullheart windows server hater and despite everything that comes with it. It's stable, extremely fast and when edited/hacked right also privacy aware.