I would not expect any delay rotating the surface.  Maybe you are clipping  with a near clip plane and it is constantly recomputing the clipping plane cap on every motion.  In that case you could turn off clip plane caps ("surface cap false").  Even if you do that if you are using Full or Soft lighting with near clipping then the ambient shadowing of those lighting mode will update on every motion since the clipped away part constantly changes.  That casts shadows from 64 directions basically equivalent to rendering 64 frames and will slow down even the fastest graphics card.  To remedy that switch to simple lighting (Toolbar button, or command "light simple") which does not cast shadows.  If you are not using clipping then I bet something else is updating on the CPU and you will have to provide more details of what exact ChimeraX features you are using (what kind of coloring, what other models are shown, what tools are you using, ...).

Tom