As a newbie in a graphics course I once animated something using xlib and openGL. I hadn't bothered install my graphics card driver, so everything was nice and slow.

I brought it into to the professor's office (it was our final) to demo it, and it was so fast on his machine that you couldn't see it. I freaked out, but he had seen that kind of problem before and just sprinkled some sleeps throughout so it was visible to a human and gave me a B.