To Quartz or not to Quartz?

T

TeeboAccrete

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I have a G4 450 DP, AGP Radeon 32MB, OS 10.2.3. It seems Quartz Extreme is iether partially active or not at all.... I checked the plist and it's all ok. But my mouse pointer does not have the think white outline with the shadow....
When I take my HD with the OS and put it in a Quicksilver G4 700, Quartz Extreme seems to be active, I can tell by the Mouse pointer once again.

Now, I'm a graphic designer, and I worked on the Quicksilver for a month and then went back to the G4 450DP (had to change the power suply.... but that's another story...). My 2 year old 450DP is definitively faster than the Quicksilver....

Now (2), is it because of Quartz Extreme? Would Quartz slow down the overall performance?

How can I activate Quartz Extreme on the 450 DP (AGP graphic card.... it should work right away.... that's why I don't understand).

Thanks to all for your comments. :D
 
The mouse pointer is NOT a definitive way to tell if QE is active. I DO NOT have Quartz extreme active on a G4/400 PCI machine, and I've got the mouse pointer with drop shadow.

I also have a G3/400 iMac SE and the mouse pointer does NOT have the shadow.

Better to download a program called Quartz Extreme Checker from versiontracker.com to tell if QE is really active. There are no visual clues in the OS to tell if it's active or not.
 
TeeboAccrete

Believe it or not, I bought a DP 1 GHz due to my dissappointment with Quartz Extreme on a single processor G4 450. Even on the DP 1 GHz window resizing is a little jerky and always will be until we have quad processor G7 Macs (perhaps I am exagerating a bit).

Search on my name on this forum - I was in a ton of threads dealing with this. I'm not sure what you are dissatisfied with, but if window resizing plays a part, take a look at my threads and the tricky little graph on the Apple Jaguar page - they use different scales on the graph that shows QE window resizing improvement - it aint much when you read the small print on the side of the graphs.

P.S. My G4 450 had a Radeon 8500 - same card is in the DP 1 GHz. I'm willing to bet QE is running just the way it is supposed to on your Macs.

P.P.S. I'm not sure a DP has much to do with QE as your card and the clock speed of your machine.
 
QE doesn't really help scrolling or resizing that much at all. Please understand that QE allows the composition of windows on screen to be done with the graphics card - not the drawing of the windows themselves. The drawing of the windows are still done via the CPU like 10.1. It's only the composition that is done in hardware. The understand how QE works, check out the bottom link...

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/macosx-10.2/macosx-10.2-8.html#enter-qe

For the article:

Although scrolling is still often much slower than it should be, the performance has improved significantly in Jaguar. Previous versions of Mac OS X would redraw the entire contents of the window during scrolling. Jaguar simply shifts the existing content upward or downward as necessary (something that can be done in hardware on the video card, even without Quartz Extreme), and then redraws only the newly revealed portion of the window. (This effect is easy to see using the Quartz Debug application included on the developer tools disk. Just turn on the "flash screen updates" option and scroll a few windows.)

Window resizing remains very slow, especially in "brushed metal" applications like iTunes and iPhoto. Window resizing sometimes actually seems worse overall in Jaguar--an impression created by the proliferation of the brushed metal interface. Whatever is making window resizing so slow needs to be found and fixed. Quartz Extreme doesn't help in any measurably way, so obviously window composition overhead is not the culprit.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by phatsharpie
QE doesn't really help scrolling or resizing that much at all. Please understand that QE allows the composition of windows on screen to be done with the graphics card - not the drawing of the windows themselves. The drawing of the windows are still done via the CPU like 10.1. It's only the composition that is done in hardware. The understand how QE works, check out the bottom link...
Click to expand...

Thanks for this, that's interesting. So my uneducated and unimformed guess was kind of right - for snappy window resizing, we will have to wait for new processors Kind of absurd when you think about it (from a consumer and not so much a technical standpoint). This is why I wish Apple (or someone else) would let users select a "show outline while reszing windows" option. Many apps do this by default (Office X for example) and since Apple is still selling G3 ibooks I think it would be a nice option for people using those machines and I would use it myself on my G4 DP 1 Ghz. All the Apple apps (iPhoto, Mail...) are the worst offenders in clunky resizing and it only serves to detract from all the other great things about OS X.

One more point - when I put in the Radeon 8500 in my G4 450 (prior to QE and 10.2), I did notice a much sharper image and I could swear window moving was much better, but the same did not seem to change (from a subjective visual point of view) when I upgraded to 10.2. However, switching to the DP 1 GHz made a huge difference in all resize/move/scroll... issues, though it is still not perfect.
 
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