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My PowerPC Macs will last a little longer now…

eyoungren

eyoungren

macrumors Nehalem
Original poster
Aug 31, 2011
30,392
30,156
So, recently, in another thread I reported my trevails about T4Fx and websites I bank with and do online bill pay with.

Part of the reason I am moving to fully Intel Macs this year (and still am).

I did state that my PowerPC Macs would still have their uses, but mainly the online bill paying and banking stuff will no longer be part of it.

Today, I have discovered that all my issues with those sites can be remedied to a fair amount when using Demeter 1.0.9. Now, to be fair, it's not the stock version. This particular version was linked to Leopard Webkit within the last year or so and it's the browser I use for YouTube video on my PowerPC Macs. It's also got a Intel Mac/Chrome user agent applied.

But I thought, what the hell, lets see if I can get in to all the problem sites.

And yeah…every one of them loaded as they should.

But, this browser is over 10 years old. I'm not going to pay bills with it. But as a way to check things quickly, which is a lot of the reason I go to these sites for, it puts both my Quad and my PB back in the fight for a little longer.
 
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wicknix said:
Cool. To be fair... if you relinked against leopard webkit then your browser really isn't 10 years old. The UI might be, but underneath you are as up to date as safari 11 is.

Cheers
Click to expand...
Yeah, true. But the actual browser code for Demeter is that old. I love Demeter because it's the fastest browser I've ever used but it's unstable when things get complicated - which is why I had never tried it for these sites.
 
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eyoungren said:
Yeah, true. But the actual browser code for Demeter is that old. I love Demeter because it's the fastest browser I've ever used but it's unstable when things get complicated - which is why I had never tried it for these sites.
Click to expand...
To the stupid ones: after having dropped Demeter onto the relink-droplet I ought to get a new Demeter+webkit-archive. May I only use that (e.g. put it into the Application folder) and can I delete the original DemeterApp-file afterwards?
 
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bobesch said:
To the stupid ones: after having dropped Demeter onto the relink-droplet I ought to get a new Demeter+webkit-archive. May I only use that (e.g. put it into the Application folder) and can I delete the original DemeterApp-file afterwards?
Click to expand...
I would keep both.

Your question suggests the solution to another problem I am having on my Quad. I'll see what happens later tonight. But yeah, you would use the LWK version and you can put that anywhere you want - just like a regular app.
 
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vddrnnr said:
Hi eyoungren,

Can't you use Roccat for a currently developed web browser relinked with
leopard webkit?

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...
Absolutely. But I don't like Roccat's interface. It tends to focus more on being a social browser than it does being a browser.

Also…it's slower than Demeter.

But that it a good idea. Might take a second look, thanks.
 
Hi eyoungren,

For the looks of Roccat you can try the following:

1. Change the toolbar background image ( you can give it a more leopard look that way)
Just a single vertical gradient line is enough. I have one if you want to try.

2. Social stuff

You can change the way the fusion bar works ( just look at preferences ). You can also turn it black which
is my preference.
You can also get rid of the preview and stuff on the title bar.

I've also noticed that if you turn on quartzgl even on machines that don't support it ( pb 12" ) using
the command line it get's faster even for youtube.

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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Hi Dronecatcher,

This is from my personal observation on my pb 12".
As far as I understood the geforce go for the latest models is missing "some"
of the required "instructions" not all and that's why it won't enable quartzgl
burdening even more the 1.5ghz G4 but if your application uses the extensions
( at least for Roccat ) it had an effect on CPU usage when in youtube.

ps-1. I still can't understand how at that time apple used a chip for a "new"
model which didn't support quartzgl. It puts all the weight of graphics
effects on the cpu which, making it worst, is not very good at multitasking.

ps0. I also noticed that if you click outside the browser window ( on the desktop )
it also lowers cpu usage when playing youtube ( or removing shadows with nocturne ).

ps1. I also found that later versions of leopard webkit are heavier than the leopard original
ones making youtube even slower than it was on those machines.

ps2. As I mentioned on another post at least on that machine ( pb 12" ) the last security
update for leopard also made things slower. In the G5's I didn't see any difference as
they are different beasts altogether.

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
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vddrnnr said:
This is from my personal observation on my pb 12".
Click to expand...

Thanks I'll give it try sometime - I've tried on other machines but maybe not my 12" Powerbook. My understanding is that enabling QuartzGL can improve some 2D aspects but ruin others, last I read video players were worse with it...but who knows?
[doublepost=1532455556][/doublepost]
vddrnnr said:
I also found that later versions of leopard webkit are heavier than the leopard original
ones making youtube even slower than it was on those machines.
Click to expand...

Are you using with Quicktime 7.7? I was slow to that one - it makes a miraculous improvement to webkit Youtube!
 
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vddrnnr said:
ps-1. I still can't understand how at that time apple used a chip for a "new"
model which didn't support quartzgl. It puts all the weight of graphics
effects on the cpu which, making it worst, is not very good at multitasking.
Click to expand...

Check my thread on the FX 5200 Core Image ambiguity.

From what I see it looks like the OpenGL hardware acceleration implementation for this card may have been incomplete. Disabling the Core Image software fallback results in a mostly glitchy experience and for the most part slower rendering than what the G4 CPU will achieve on it’s own.

It was definitely a weird choice of hardware for a pro machine. Apple patched the OS to report the FX5200 as being fully accelerated, but then made provisions in the CoreImage / QuartzCore frameworks to specifically bypass hardware rendering on this GPU *ONLY*.
 
Hi AphoticD,

Yes I believe the CPU might be faster doing those tasks but we
cannot forget it's also doing the OS and Apps. So if you
also burden it with graphics effects I thing you get an overall
worst because it's doing everything and even though "slower" the
GPU it might be it still is enough for the requirements of Leopard.

The tests in your other thread show graphics performance doing only graphics
not the whole system running so it may be misleading.

Regarding cooling it is an issue but as we already saw in other
posts we can improve a lot the standard cooling ( new paste, new fan, etc ).
I know it's not an easy task but I think most of us around here are not
"average" users.

By the way do you know if the 64Mb FX5200 model as the same limitations?
This was the last iteration of pb 12" to come out just before the intel change.

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
vddrnnr said:
Hi AphoticD,

Yes I believe the CPU might be faster doing those tasks but we
cannot forget it's also doing the OS and Apps. So if you
also burden it with graphics effects I thing you get an overall
worst because it's doing everything and even though "slower" the
GPU it might be it still is enough for the requirements of Leopard.

The tests in your other thread show graphics performance doing only graphics
not the whole system running so it may be misleading.

Regarding cooling it is an issue but as we already saw in other
posts we can improve a lot the standard cooling ( new paste, new fan, etc ).
I know it's not an easy task but I think most of us around here are not
"average" users.

By the way do you know if the 64Mb FX5200 model as the same limitations?
This was the last iteration of pb 12" to come out just before the intel change.

Best regards,
voidRunner
Click to expand...

Yes, the 64MB Go series as well as the 64MB FX5200 AGP cards in the G5s are all handled by the OS in the same manner.

I absolutely agree that the GPU *should* be handling graphics processing even where it is slower than CPU processing. It’s like asking your car’s AC to cool the engine. The AC might be able to achieve lower temperatures when pushed, but the radiator is there to do the job and so should the GPU.

I have witnessed unsatisfactory results when asking my FX5200 systems (PBG4 and G5 towers) to process Core Image filters on a separate thread while panning the orthographic camera position on the GL surface being rendered. It should be a smooth multithreaded process (think Ken Burns style panning/zooming while animating a color filter). It is smooth when the software renderer fallback is manually disabled on the CIContext, however artifacts and glitches are introduced in the process. But, in the default implementation, the request on the FX5200 causes stuttering and overloads the CPU to the point where the UI becomes unresponsive.

The OS X UI acceleration (Quartz Compositor / WindowManager), including Quartz Extreme (windows composited as OpenGL surfaces) and QuickTime 7.x video decoding (in an OpenGL context) is handled on the FX5200 GPU. But all Core Image and some OpenGL requests are offloaded to the CPU much like any of the Radeon Mobility 9200 systems, except it isn’t being reported to the user in this way.

Getting back to the QuartzGL / Quartz2D Debug switch, this essentially calls the GPU to handle in-view (in-window) Quartz drawing by translating Quartz/CoreGraphics commands into OpenGL drawing on a GL surface.

It took Apple many years to get this working right. I may be wrong on this but I believe QuartzGL was finally integrated into the standard UI rendering by about the Mavericks/Yosemite stage. Then of course El Capitan introduced the Metal API which will replace all of the mish mash of Quartz and OpenGL when Mojave is released.
 
And therein lies the paradox of the 12" G4...

Even back in 2005, Apple was cutting corners with their pro machines.

Sigh.
 
How do you get videos to load up in Demeter? Every website with a video I come to just displays a black image and no amount of clicking or right clicking or waiting results in the playing of video. Yes, I have relinked it to WebKit, and it generated Demeter LepWK (which is the version I use).

i do like the speed, though I don't know if it's any faster overall than Leopard WebKit itself, and it seems to load up pages that crash WebKit sometimes (oddly enough), but the issue with videos makes Leopard WebKit with the ViewTube hack pretty superior.
 
zarkocabarkapa said:
How do you get videos to load up in Demeter? Every website with a video I come to just displays a black image and no amount of clicking or right clicking or waiting results in the playing of video. Yes, I have relinked it to WebKit, and it generated Demeter LepWK (which is the version I use).

i do like the speed, though I don't know if it's any faster overall than Leopard WebKit itself, and it seems to load up pages that crash WebKit sometimes (oddly enough), but the issue with videos makes Leopard WebKit with the ViewTube hack pretty superior.
Click to expand...
IDK. I mainly just use it for YT video. Works just fine there.
 
eyoungren said:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883 Safari/537.36
Click to expand...
I copied that in to my user agent listing in Demeter and now Youtube just shows grey boxes and the site does not load up at all otherwise. Hmmm.
 
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