Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Quartz Extreme 2d

aussie_geek

aussie_geek

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 19, 2004
1,096
0
Sydney Australia
Ok,

It's been 2 months since Tiger and no hype about when QE2D will be activated in the OS. Has anyone got any ideas as to when it will be turned on? I know there are hacks to turn it on yourself by using the Quartz debug app but Apple has not ironed out all the bugs yet...

Do you think we will see it in 10.4.2?

aussie_geek
 
It's actually called Quartz 2D Extreme (Q2DE), and Apple may not enable it by default until 10.5 if they don't think it will be ready for general use before then. It really depends on how much impact Q2DE has on developers and when Apple can get all the bugs fixed.
 
broken_keyboard said:
I suspect they are waiting for the average machine to have a bit more video ram.
Click to expand...
I agree with this, you'd probably want to have 64MB at least across the line for Q2DE as you've suddenly increased the texture load on the GPU. Although, I'd imagine it'd probably be like CoreImage, only utilized/enabled if you have a powerful enough GPU and enough video RAM.
 
And really, I have a dual 2Ghz G5 with and an overclocked (+10% GPU/RAM) Radeon 9650 (256MB RAM) and Q2DE makes NO DIFFERENCE in performance for general computing. I even used the frame meter in Quartz Debug tool to compare fps and CPU usage when doing stuff like renedering webpages with lots of graphics and text, scrolling really fast through those pages, resizing different windows, playing with photoshop and iLife apps; I saw NO difference in either CPU usage or FPS with Q2DE on or off.

Now maybe it's because I have a relatively low-end GPU and relatively powerful CPUs that it all balances out, I really don't know, but I'd like to see other people's performance with it on and off.

Oh yea, the only bugs I've seen are at the login window.
 
zakatov said:
And really, I have a dual 2Ghz G5 with and an overclocked (+10% GPU/RAM) Radeon 9650 (256MB RAM) and Q2DE makes NO DIFFERENCE in performance for general computing. I even used the frame meter in Quartz Debug tool to compare fps and CPU usage when doing stuff like renedering webpages with lots of graphics and text, scrolling really fast through those pages, resizing different windows, playing with photoshop and iLife apps; I saw NO difference in either CPU usage or FPS with Q2DE on or off.

Now maybe it's because I have a relatively low-end GPU and relatively powerful CPUs that it all balances out, I really don't know, but I'd like to see other people's performance with it on and off.

Oh yea, the only bugs I've seen are at the login window.
Click to expand...


what kind of results have you safely gotten overclocking the 9650? I put mine up ~6%, and it runs fine, but I'm afraid to go higher. so you're saying 10% is safe? or can it go even higher still?

as for Q2DE, I activated it for a while and it helped a few things, but I turned it back off since I was worried it might take GPU power away from running Motion. I have nothing to back that up, but I just had the thought
 
I've done a little GPU overclocking with an old Geforce4 Ti in my PC. In my experience, how much you can safely overclock it depends on the individual chip. Just keep bumping it in small steps, and keep checking it. Once it gets unstable, drop the level of overclocking a bit and stop there.
 
Rocksaurus said:
You can enable Q2DE yourself...? If so, who cares if Apple adds it?
Click to expand...

for the sake of official support and we'll also see it start popping up in apps and making OS X even better throughout. by doing it yourself there are little gains at then moment, because it is unofficial.
 
kwajo.com said:
what kind of results have you safely gotten overclocking the 9650? I put mine up ~6%, and it runs fine, but I'm afraid to go higher. so you're saying 10% is safe? or can it go even higher still?
Click to expand...

A rule of thumb is anything below 15% OC is fine.

When I'm playing games, I usually OC to about 15% for both ram and gpu with no artifacts or instability. I haven't tried OC higher bcause I don't really need to. I run it at 10% for general computing just to be on the safe side.

I'm using ATIcellerator II. (only works for ATI cards).

EDIT: most games are GPU limited, so overclocking 15% actually yields 15% improvement in FPS.
 
zakatov said:
And really, I have a dual 2Ghz G5 with and an overclocked (+10% GPU/RAM) Radeon 9650 (256MB RAM) and Q2DE makes NO DIFFERENCE in performance for general computing. I even used the frame meter in Quartz Debug tool to compare fps and CPU usage when doing stuff like renedering webpages with lots of graphics and text, scrolling really fast through those pages, resizing different windows, playing with photoshop and iLife apps; I saw NO difference in either CPU usage or FPS with Q2DE on or off.

Now maybe it's because I have a relatively low-end GPU and relatively powerful CPUs that it all balances out, I really don't know, but I'd like to see other people's performance with it on and off.

Oh yea, the only bugs I've seen are at the login window.
Click to expand...
I'm wondering how much of these differences are because of a weak GPU, or the fact that many apps may still be using QuickDraw functions because they were faster than Quartz functions. Though, you'd think Apple's apps would already be using the newer APIs. There might be some software tuning that's required on the part of developers... who knows. I'd like to see if Q2DE really can offer some improvement in the traditionally "weak" areas of OS X responsiveness, like window-resizing and scrolling, once it's on and being optimized for. It sure would be nice.
 
gangst said:
for the sake of official support and we'll also see it start popping up in apps and making OS X even better throughout. by doing it yourself there are little gains at then moment, because it is unofficial.
Click to expand...

Roger that... On another note will Q2DE hurt game performance by taking up VRAM...?
 
Rocksaurus said:
Roger that... On another note will Q2DE hurt game performance by taking up VRAM...?
Click to expand...
In an ideal situation, the acceleration provided by Q2DE will actually help games perform better because it'll accelerate the drawing operations most games use so heavily. In the worst case, it'll only accelerate the user interface and slow down the game when it's not in use.

In a typical case I'd expect it to accelerate the user interface parts of the game then go into deep sleep while the game is running so the game doesn't slow down.
 
Which applications currently use Quartz ( 2D Extreme ) ?
Are there any significant speedups for these apps?
What about Finder for example???
 
We might see it released in Leopard. There's still lot's of bugs to work out, and how it will work with resolution independent displays still has to be ironed out. Leopard might see a rewritten Finder to take advantage of Quartz 2D Extreme.
 
Militar said:
We might see it released in Leopard. There's still lot's of bugs to work out, and how it will work with resolution independent displays still has to be ironed out. Leopard might see a rewritten Finder to take advantage of Quartz 2D Extreme.
Click to expand...

What makes you think Q24E is so far away and so buggy? Wasn't it advertised at a WWDC or something as a Tiger feature when Schiller did the electric zebra thing or was that core image?
 
gangst said:
What makes you think Q24E is so far away and so buggy? Wasn't it advertised at a WWDC or something as a Tiger feature when Schiller did the electric zebra thing or was that core image?
Click to expand...
That particular demo was of Core Image.
 
There are posts elsewhere on this site and other forums about what can only be described as "graphics meltdowns" with Q2DE enabled. No hardware damage, just bizarre melted-looking graphics that seem to get worse with each passing minute it is enabled. My guess is that it will appear (ie. be enabled by default) by at least 10.4.5 but not in 10.4.2.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back