My Roku TV is old enough that I genuinely considered replacing it last year, mostly because every menu felt like it was wading through mud. Apps took a bit too long to open, and they buffered a lot. I assumed that was just the price of holding onto older hardware. It turns out most of that wasn’t the hardware giving up; it was the software asking too much of it.
Turning off wallpaper animations speeds things up
Older hardware has trouble rendering all the sliding effects
If you want to fix a slow Roku TV, head into the accessibility settings in the system menu and find the toggle for wallpaper animations. With that setting turned on, the TV has to keep rendering little movements behind your app icons the whole time you’re scrolling. These are subtle shifts, lighting changes, that kind of thing. It doesn’t sound like much, but it actually eats up processing power and memory just to keep that background looking fancy.
It is a complete waste of processing power. On an older TV, that extra work on top of running the actual interface is usually what causes the laggy, stuttery feeling when you’re flipping through menus. Once you switch it off, the background just stays still, and the processor can put all its attention into running the apps instead of wasting it on a moving picture nobody really needs.
To turn it off, press the Home button on your remote, go into Settings, and then Theme. From there, find Wallpaper animations and switch them to Disabled. That’ll stop the home screen background from shifting around every time you scroll through your apps.โโโโโโโ