Re: Re: Resizing
1st of all: GrokGod and Rower_CPU please just shut up. You will obviously bicker on FOREVER, so i dont want to hear any more of this arguing crap. Now back to the TOPIC:
There's a variety of things to concider. I'm assuming Windows 98/Me/XP all use hardware acceleration since they get 2D Antialiasing so fast, and the GUI is so resonsive. But now consider how simple the WinXP GUI is, it's a few gradients and graphics connected to some text which is rendered using the GUI's 2D Acceleration unit. In OSX the resizing is very CPU intense for a few reasons: 1) The actual drawing is done in CPU, 2) Whatever CPU is left need to be devoted to alphabatizing (try turning it off, runs a bit faster), scalling the icons, and moving them to fit in the frame. So yes I still back my claim that it's intense on the CPU. Now look back to WinXP, they use single-buffering (which looks like junk) and from my personal guess it appears that it updates the contents only when it has cycles, unlike OSX which updates it constantly. I don't know how clear that reads so i'll put it this way: when you scale a window in 98/XP it has an awful trail of garbled color behind it, which is most noticable on slow machines. I'd have to GUESS that this is because the scale is done in the GPU, but the contents needs to be done in the CPU.
Now fast forward to MacOS X 10.2. There seems to still be an issue with QE and what will happen to my Rage 128 or whatever. Well to me it seems obvious that only a 256-bit GPU (which all include a variety of advanced features) will be required to map Quartz onto OpenGL, thus hardware accelerating them. If this is true, Apple could do two things: 1) run as much Quartz as possible in the CPU, but leaving the majority of it to to CPU (thus eliminating the need for a lot of VRAM in Rage GPU systems) or 2) simply leave Quartz in it's existing CPU form, which is actually very polished in my opinion.
Ok now we all know without some insane G4 the windows still resize poort as shnapps but then look at examples of resizing in OS9. Some apps like Final Cut used it, they look about as bad as the Windows resize on a slow computer, other apps simply have a poor resize respnsiveness. In truth if apple can pull off really fast Quartz on a GPU they will be gods in the graphics world. Never before has anyone made such an advanced API run on the GPU. Notice how excited apple seems about "opening new opertunities for applicaiton developers" and stuff? This is because many developers have been running around Quartz, opting for an inferior implimentation on OpenGL (which some OSX games use instead of Quartz). But now we should see games and programs using the most complex Quartz effects, at insane speeds, and at insane quality.
As for the VRAM debates, well no Radeon or GeForce2 has ever shipped with under 16MB, so i dont think that's a problem. As for weather that's the limiter or not, i doubt it. I'm pretty sure even if your Rage 128 Pro had 32MB of DDR ram it still wouldn't run Quartz Extreme. But like i said earlier, it's still possible Apple could offer SOME support for hardware Quartz on older 128-bit GPUs, and those with 8MB of ram. Time will tell...
1st of all: GrokGod and Rower_CPU please just shut up. You will obviously bicker on FOREVER, so i dont want to hear any more of this arguing crap. Now back to the TOPIC:
There's a variety of things to concider. I'm assuming Windows 98/Me/XP all use hardware acceleration since they get 2D Antialiasing so fast, and the GUI is so resonsive. But now consider how simple the WinXP GUI is, it's a few gradients and graphics connected to some text which is rendered using the GUI's 2D Acceleration unit. In OSX the resizing is very CPU intense for a few reasons: 1) The actual drawing is done in CPU, 2) Whatever CPU is left need to be devoted to alphabatizing (try turning it off, runs a bit faster), scalling the icons, and moving them to fit in the frame. So yes I still back my claim that it's intense on the CPU. Now look back to WinXP, they use single-buffering (which looks like junk) and from my personal guess it appears that it updates the contents only when it has cycles, unlike OSX which updates it constantly. I don't know how clear that reads so i'll put it this way: when you scale a window in 98/XP it has an awful trail of garbled color behind it, which is most noticable on slow machines. I'd have to GUESS that this is because the scale is done in the GPU, but the contents needs to be done in the CPU.
Now fast forward to MacOS X 10.2. There seems to still be an issue with QE and what will happen to my Rage 128 or whatever. Well to me it seems obvious that only a 256-bit GPU (which all include a variety of advanced features) will be required to map Quartz onto OpenGL, thus hardware accelerating them. If this is true, Apple could do two things: 1) run as much Quartz as possible in the CPU, but leaving the majority of it to to CPU (thus eliminating the need for a lot of VRAM in Rage GPU systems) or 2) simply leave Quartz in it's existing CPU form, which is actually very polished in my opinion.
Ok now we all know without some insane G4 the windows still resize poort as shnapps but then look at examples of resizing in OS9. Some apps like Final Cut used it, they look about as bad as the Windows resize on a slow computer, other apps simply have a poor resize respnsiveness. In truth if apple can pull off really fast Quartz on a GPU they will be gods in the graphics world. Never before has anyone made such an advanced API run on the GPU. Notice how excited apple seems about "opening new opertunities for applicaiton developers" and stuff? This is because many developers have been running around Quartz, opting for an inferior implimentation on OpenGL (which some OSX games use instead of Quartz). But now we should see games and programs using the most complex Quartz effects, at insane speeds, and at insane quality.
As for the VRAM debates, well no Radeon or GeForce2 has ever shipped with under 16MB, so i dont think that's a problem. As for weather that's the limiter or not, i doubt it. I'm pretty sure even if your Rage 128 Pro had 32MB of DDR ram it still wouldn't run Quartz Extreme. But like i said earlier, it's still possible Apple could offer SOME support for hardware Quartz on older 128-bit GPUs, and those with 8MB of ram. Time will tell...
