Improve performance

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Is there anything I can do to increase performance?

Yes. There are two things that you should consider when you want to increase the performance of your application.

First, take a look at your scene graph. Remove empty (unused) nodes. Keep in mind that OpenGL state changes are expensive, so position objects in a way that they can share textures and materials whenever possible. Try to optimize your scene graph for render caching. And so on... This is not Mac-specific advice, but I'm repeating it here since it's so important.

Secondly, you might want to change the settings for automatic render caching (storing rendering instructions for faster execution, usually by using display lists). Display lists take up precious graphics card memory, so we are rather conservative about when we enable caching. (See the SoSeparator documentation for more information about render caching.) If you have enough graphics memory, you'll probably want to override Coin's all-too-cautious behaviour - try e.g. setting the COIN_AUTOCACHE_LOCAL_MAX variable to 10000 instead of the default, 1000. Your mileage may vary, but I get up to a 100% FPS speedup on my Powerbook (ATI Radeon 9000) by doing this.