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Quartz Extreme Clarification

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Apr 9, 2001
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There appears to be an endless amount of confusion regarding Mac OS X (Jaguar) and Quartz Extreme acceleration.

According to Apple, a "supported" video card is the following:

*nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card.

Then, they make this recommendation:

32MB VRAM recommended for optimum performance.

In confirmation is this xlr8yourmac thread in which an ATI employee notes that Quartz Extreme will work with 16mb.

Bottom line: the new iBooks will be able to take advantage of Quartz Extreme.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2002/05/21/quartz-extreme-clarification/
Bottom line: Bottom line: the new iBooks will be able to take advantage of Quartz Extreme.
Click to expand...
This is exactly what i've been saying for a while now -- obviously some people can't tell the difference between "required" and "recommended".
 
This has been done to death.

The real question now is HOW it runs on unsupported hardware. Do we get old Quartz at faster/same speeds, or QE at horribly slow speeds?

All will be explained once we have Jaguar in our hands.
 
Quartz

Well i am running 10.2 and i have a standard ati 32 mb graphics card and you can definatley tell the difference without quartz... actions are smoother refreshes faster.. etc etc... i think it is a very big improvement.. and this is on a relatively meek video card... so i am guessing a 16 mb one would still be satifactory...
 
This is one area I fear my TiBook 500 will show it's age...... although by the time 'Jaguar' is released, i won't have long until my upgrade window..... :D so I'm not that fussed...... :D
 
It says 32mb for optimum performance
and it will probably be 16mb minimum.....minimum
 
My $0.02

Some people may be confused, so i'll say what I know about Quartz:

Currently in MacOS X/10.1 Quartz is entirely rendered on the CPU, making it nice for DP G4s, but not good for older macs with Rage PRO/II graphics cards (not enough VRAM for smooth refresh during high CPU load) or most G3 macs with built in graphics under a Rage 128 (G3 B/W stocks, iBooks ESPECIALLY, older PowerBooks).

With Quartz Extreme all/most of the Quartz operations will be done using the existing 2D OpenGL video card acceleration. Thus any one with AGP 2x and a Radeon/GeForce2 can run the same as a DP Mac, with a lot less $. Of course DP G4 users can now get back precious loads of CPU cycles on that 2D processor.

Why apple is excited is that Quartz Extreme will now run SO fast (on fast vid cards) new, and exciting effects can be pulled off. I personally have a short list I sent to apple (windows that shatter when you close them, more genie effects, high-speed zoom-effects and that kind of stuff). My real hope is that MacOS X will render web pages faster, which is my only real complaint. Even if it's still CPU-bound, since Quartz is offloaded EVERYTHING in Jaguar will run at least 20% faster, since you get more CPU to spare. In Quartz related tasks (some games, finder, text scrolling) it *should* be as fast as in MacOS 9 (which i ran yesterday, and was amazed at the smoothness of IE scrolling, darn)

If i'm wrong anywhere, feel free to correct me. Also is anyone has a fast 32MB DDR or better Vid Card and Jaguar Dev Preview, I'd like to hear if you can scroll in OmniWeb/IE faster or not. Maybe with QE Apple will get around to threading scrolling so MacOS X users can get pages that load as we scroll, like stupid Win98/XP users. (grips fist) :mad:
 
Oh yeah...

as for the new iBook, I think between the faster 3D and the suport for Quartz Extreme, it'll become a real MacOS X machine (unlike so many users who are forced to run in OS9 due to low performance)
 
Indeed

Yes, laptops have always been weaker than desktops in expandability. I laughed at two of my friend's laptops bc their WinTel boxes didn't come with half the luxuries of my iBook's (Dual USB-500Mhz). Most importantly firewire, airport, and hard-ware accelerated video. That's why Apple has always been so strong in the laptop field, they have experience making full-featured motherboards and cool-running CPUs :¬).
 
im just mad that i wont be able to utilize the QE features with my 500 mhz iBook. do you think that 10.2 will still be able to run on the older iBooks?
 
For a 1000 times, Yes!

Yes, 10.2 will run on your iBook - heck 10.2 should run on a Rev A, Bondi-Blue iMac (while that might be painful!) if you have enough RAM in it!
 
I've used OSX on the 1st iMac (233Mhz/138MB RAM), yes it's sloooow. I'm not sure, but for some reason, even though Quartz is entirely CPU based, it runs oddly slow on that iMac. I guess the iMac is just painfully slow in CPU performance. Oh well, if you have an old imac i suggest a new iMac G4 or a G4 Upgrade card, it's NOT worth running OSX on the 1st iMac, unless you never touch classic, carbon, or QuickTime. Maybe as a file server...
 
Re: For a 1000 times, Yes!

Originally posted by eric_n_dfw
Yes, 10.2 will run on your iBook - heck 10.2 should run on a Rev A, Bondi-Blue iMac (while that might be painful!) if you have enough RAM in it!
Click to expand...

Wake up and pay attention to the post topic!

We're talking Quartz Extreme here, not 10.2. There is no guarantee of how or if QE will run on unsupported hardware.
 
My G3 233 (beige)...

Originally posted by MasterX (OSiX)
I've used OSX on the 1st iMac (233Mhz/138MB RAM), yes it's sloooow. I'm not sure, but for some reason, even though Quartz is entirely CPU based, it runs oddly slow on that iMac. I guess the iMac is just painfully slow in CPU performance. Oh well, if you have an old imac i suggest a new iMac G4 or a G4 Upgrade card, it's NOT worth running OSX on the 1st iMac, unless you never touch classic, carbon, or QuickTime. Maybe as a file server...
Click to expand...

...runs slightly faster on a few operations than my friend's G4 450 (of course it's slower on most, but still fine). My machine has 384MBs of ram and a 7200rpm hard drive, his has 320 and the stock hard drive.
 
i just installed jaguar on my lombard (G3 powerbook, 333mhz, 66mhz bus, 512mb ram) and my first impressions were very bad. much slower than 10.1, but... this is because the first ting i started playing with was iChat (biggest POS ever, cant believe apple made it).

Once i quit that disgrace of an "iapp" and started playing with other apps and windows and such i noticed there was a speed improvement after all. Scrolling actually is smooth!

It should be noted that this is the second slowest mac able to run osx (the 233 powerbook before it is the slowest). All the new sliding effects are pretty neat.

but the scrolling in mozilla was smooth and that impressed me since my g4imac doesnt even do that smoothly.

I see the little blue beach ball (for lack of a better term) a lot still. System Preferences are very slow to load.

i checked the cpu load as i moved windows and such using the top -u command in the terminal and noticed that cpu load while manipulating the gui elements was significantly less than previously (used to 100% just by moving a window).

Also of interest for those who know a little more about macs is that i used the update install rather than a clean install. Not what i woudl normally do but i wanted to be able to make a safe comparison. So many people compare the speed of jaguar (doesnt say 10.2 anywhere, even though thats what we know it is) on a fresh install to a 6 month old install of 10.1. Not fair. So i did an update on my 1 month old install and still noticed everything i have been talking about. So the speed improvement is most certainly not a result of a fresh install (the cpu load also clearly shows this).
 
It's very easy to check...

Originally posted by mmmdreg
I'm a bit slow still...does QE work on the olde imacs? like the current old ones?
Click to expand...

...if it has a radeon, it works. If it has a GeForce2mx or higher, it works. If I remember correctly the CRT iMacs have rage pros, so it won't work. The LCD iMacs and the eMac have GF2mxs.
 
My fear is although the Apple site says you need 32 mb for optimum performance, if your card is not in the list "GeForce 2 MX ... " then Apple might stop giving you the privelege of running Quartz Extreme.

Anyone remember iDVD and non Apple installed Pioneer drives? Even though they were compatible Apple didn't let you use them. Eventually a crack came out, but it might be harder this time with QE.
 
It would make sense if by "optimally," Apple meant "at high resolutions." I'm going to bet that QE on a 16MB card will be capped at 800x600 or 1024x768 (or maybe 1152x768 on the rev B TiBooks - I hope). A 16MB card can render 1600x1200x32bpp in 2D just fine, but I don't think 16MB would be enough to do the same in hardware-accelerated 3D.

Alex
 
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