I was using Cocoa Animation (core animation implemented in AppKit), initially layer-backed and was getting poor looking results with NSTableView (flickering contents on resize etc. possibly because of the NSScrollView performance hit, Scott mentions above), I switched off the WantsLayer but left the view animator code and got exactly what I needed and it works perfectly. I assume this is the "animation" code in AppKit that doesn’t require CAlayers.

WantsLayer is needed for things other than moving the frame/bounds around, for instance for fading views,... If you are just moving views arounds, the animator works without the need for WantsLayer (and then none of the text rendering issues).