BeamSync setting has ruined OSX Lion

Question

I am running OSX Lion on a Macbook Pro. Some website suggested I put in a command in the terminal to 'increase my graphics performance' by turning off BeamSync. The command was:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -dict deferredUpdates 0

The performance of this Mac is now utterly pathetic. Animations do not run properly and some of them are missing completely. Its like the GFX card has been disabled.

I tried running the command again with a 1, but it did not help. Does the deferredUpdates setting get cached somewhere, or enable something else thats causing the issue?

Answer 1

When I attempt to read that value, I get told it doesn't exist:

$ defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -dict deferredUpdates
2011-09-28 11:44:23.535 defaults[4532:707]
The domain/default pair of (com.apple.windowserver, Compositor) does not exist

IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT

You are about to make a serious modification. You should have backed up the relevant plist file before making any changes. But now, you should absolutely do so just in case you make a change that causes serious system instability.

MAKE A BACKUP OF /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver RIGHT THIS MOMENT!!!!!!

Please don't do this until you have taken necessary safe-guards and understand what my command is actually doing. I suspect you may be able to restore the default by issuing:

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor

I suggest this because I notice that in that plist file (/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver), I have no reference to 'Compositor' whatsoever.