why is my animation smoother with gsap DevTools on?

[geedix]

I've noticed that when I remove devTools from my cpu-heavy animations, the start gets a little rough. There are flashes of elements popping into place.

Is there something I can do to make it just as smooth after DevTools is gone?

 

 

 

See the Pen QWPjBbx by geedix (@geedix) on CodePen

[GreenSock]

Short answer: Just force the playhead to the end and then back to the beginning like this: 

tl.progress(1).progress(0);

That basically pre-renders everything. 

 

The problem was that you're doing a stagger on a from() tween, thus technically the start of the sub-tweens are offset and you're seeing those start in a staggered fashion. GSDevTools employs a trick to force the playhead to the end as an optimization.