Plans for Working hardware Accelated UI and bitmaps? (OS X)

[blackhand1001]

I was using the release candidate for windows 7 and I I noticed the difference between wddm 1.1's accelerated GDI vs wddm 1.0 non accelerated UI. THe speed difference is gigantic especially when resizing windows especially complicated ones like this website, even on older hardware where older computers running vista or OS X would choke. SO this got me wondering. Does apple have any plans to have a working accelerated UI like GDI or Direct2d that will be enabled by default and not have draw errors like quartz 2d extreme?

 

[Catfish_Man]

QuartzGL (formerly Quartz 2D Extreme) is enabled where useful by applications. It's a completely supported thing, it's just only useful for certain types of apps.

 

[blackhand1001]

QuartzGL (formerly Quartz 2D Extreme) is enabled where useful by applications. It's a completely supported thing, it's just only useful for certain types of apps.

Are you sure its enabled by default? I recall it having to be turned on.

 

[t0mat0]

10.6? I haven't seen it in these terms, but it's very likely the GPGPU push would include speeding up the UI - APple is already more GPU vs CPU usage for the UI.

 

[ihabime]

10.6? I haven't seen it in these terms, but it's very likely the GPGPU push would include speeding up the UI - APple is already more GPU vs CPU usage for the UI.

GPGPU and UI acceleration are drastically different things.

UI Acceleration uses the GPU in it's native mode to do 2D and 3D translations for the UI in the same way that games use the GPU to handle their graphics.

GPGPU, as the name implies, uses the GPU for General Purpose calculations, heavy duty number crunching, matrix calculation, raytracing, video and audio conversion. The GPU can plow through large datasets faster than the CPU, but still not fast enough for realtime UI calculations, it's not meant to.

 

[Catfish_Man]

Are you sure its enabled by default? I recall it having to be turned on.

That used to be true; in Leopard they added an API for applications to turn it on if they need it. If I remember correctly, Preview has it turned on for example.

 

[blackhand1001]

I took some videos of how accelerating the UI make things like smooth scrolling and resizing much better. It looks better in real life because I didn;t use an actual camcorder to take them and youtube compresses them and limits the framerate. Make sure you hit HQ, it helps alot. The 2D acceleration makes a big difference on computers with slow processors. If you use xp on an old machine for web browsing, the pages still resize smoothly. I see this as important, especially with chips like the atom which are only about as fast as old pentium 3's of the same speed. Window resizing on macs from that same period in OS X was dreadful, so I believe acceleration of the UI is necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEbX4hbuwmY&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3EX2PSymk&feature=channel

 

[Bullshark]

Windows 7 UI is MUCH better than previous versions, thats for sure. I cant imagine Apple doesnt have plans for this to be in the works . I had Windows 7 on my HP laptop for 5 months or so, I would say the difference is huge..

 

[blackhand1001]

I got some more videos of the how acceleration, even with intel graphics, makes a difference from a 800 MHz Pentium III box i had laying around. One video of acceleration enabled and one without.

Without:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcnC55qzfWI&fmt=18

With:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlLNVYHuvxs&fmt=18

It really makes a difference. I was surprised how well web browsing still worked on such an old machine. I hope that Apple has something in development that is stable enough for the end user cause my experience with a 900mhz G3 ibook was pretty slow and thats a newer machine than the one in this video.

 

[blackhand1001]

Duplicate.... Delete

 

[Riemann Zeta]

With both QuartzExtreme (yes, it's a dumb-sounding name) and QuartzGL enabled (use the QuartzDebug trick to enable it), you gain equivalent windowing/font acceleration functionality as Windows' WDM. And there are no "draw errors" in QuartzGL anymore. There were in OS 10.4, but enabling it works fine in OS 10.5.7. The only thing that must be done after system-wide enabling QuartzGL is adding the following bool variable to the Info.plist of Safari:

QuartzGLEnable == No

Flash bombs Safari if QGL is enabled. Also, add this variable to any Adobe application--Adobe apps run slower with text-drawing acceleration enabled.

But to be honest, nothing is going to help that iBook G3. The GPU is an original ATi Radeon M1, which was released before programmable shaders existed and the G3 processor has no vector unit/SIMD capability. As such, I doubt that the machine can support QuartzGL.

 

[blackhand1001]

With both QuartzExtreme (yes, it's a dumb-sounding name) and QuartzGL enabled (use the QuartzDebug trick to enable it), you gain equivalent windowing/font acceleration functionality as Windows' WDM. And there are no "draw errors" in QuartzGL anymore. There were in OS 10.4, but enabling it works fine in OS 10.5.7. The only thing that must be done after system-wide enabling QuartzGL is adding the following bool variable to the Info.plist of Safari:

QuartzGLEnable == No

Flash bombs Safari if QGL is enabled. Also, add this variable to any Adobe application--Adobe apps run slower with text-drawing acceleration enabled.

But to be honest, nothing is going to help that iBook G3. The GPU is an original ATi Radeon M1, which was released before programmable shaders existed and the G3 processor has no vector unit/SIMD capability. As such, I doubt that the machine can support QuartzGL.

The g3 I have actually has an nvidia card with 32mb of ram. Not sure which one. Its pretty old but its got the newer font for the name on the bezel, not the original like times new roman font. If safari doesn't support quartzgl then its pretty pointless since what gdi accleration enabled that old computer to do was do web browsing a decent speed with responsive scrolling and resizing.