Yep, of course, you have to choose 'no effect' in 'Appearance' to get best frame rate. MacOSX should have this option too.
I haven't used it in a while, but OSX probably still has these options scattered around the place, like choosing whether or not to 'animate' various actions, choosing to auto-hide the dock, choosing transparencies in various places .. but not a single switch and some things are not accessible directly by the GUI but are all settable via CL so a script to turn all off would be straightforward, or use third party preference setting apps to do it for you if unix style CL stuff is not for you - I remember something like 'onyx' was a good one of these.
Simon