It's definitely bound to hardware acceleration: I just tried on an old MacPro (2008) and it stutters with hardware acceleration enabled, but runs smoothly without. Apparently, there are some overoptimistic assumptions about the GPU hardware available.
Open the developer console, press ctrl+shift+p (I guess, cmd instead of ctrl in Mac), a search bar shows up, write "fps" in it, and there you can turn on an FPS meter popup.