Do live wallpapers affect performance on Mac?
It depends on the app you use. Optimized apps like Wallper use minimal CPU and pause when not visible, so the impact is very low.
Performance depends almost entirely on how the wallpaper engine is implemented. Wallper uses native AVFoundation playback with hardware decoding on Apple Silicon, which keeps CPU usage in the low single digits for 4K content.
Playback is automatically paused when a full‑screen app is focused, when the display sleeps, and optionally when the Mac is running on battery. In practice this means battery impact is indistinguishable from running a regular static wallpaper for most users.