ive been working with rack for a couple years now. one feature i always thought was missing is a suspend or pause animations button. i have noticed that when a patch starts to get too big for the cpu to handle you can go to “save as”, the menu to save will come up, the animations stop and the unstable audio will suddenly stabilize. unfortunately once you are in the menu you cant tweak knobs or anything though. this makes me wish there was a button on the top menu you could toggle to stop all the flashing lights and such. it would be nice to be able to stabilize the patch this way without bringing up the menu.
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You can set the lowest framerate in the menu. It will have almost the same effect as stopping the GUI altogether.
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once you do that its very difficult to get out of it due to the low framerate. it would be better to have a button that is not in a menu.
Requests for new features should be posted as issues in VCV’s github, otherwise they won’t be remembered or acted on.
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Animations and rotating knobs by mouse do not separate well. Even if this feature existed, you couldn’t tweak the knobs - or at least couldn’t see them change rotation, which is a very frustrating feeling imo, doesn’t worth it, it is the same as low framerates but infinitely worse 
Edit: if you meant suspending the blinking cable lights only but nothing else then that might worth a feature request, those cables are rare in the real world anyways. Unfortunately not sure what is more demanding: drawing a light with halo vs. drawing a knob with a framebuffer texture. But lights are definitely less essential.
One simple thing you can try is to build your patches sparsely or in a slim vertical line, so that you can have a viewport with only a few modules visible at any time, this can reduce the load on the GPU since modules outside of the view aren’t getting rendered. Having the cable opacity at 0 also saves you some draw calls.
Soon enough, lights won’t even have halos any more.
what do you mean?
From the rack development blog:
Made UI tweaks to more closely follow Grayscale’s design. The above screenshot demonstrates all these changes. This includes removing the LED glow/halo effect, brightening up the PJ301M port graphic, and toning down drop shadows.
Thanks for clarifying, couldn’t tell if @callumslater46 was being poetic or what…haha
That update went over my head. Well… I was never sure if I liked them or not before, but now I’m gonna miss them a bit. 
But graphics need optimizing for sure so this is a good change, the more skeumorphic modules can roll their own if needed.