iTunes for PC "windows resizing"
Greetings, I have the iBook and I have the PC (Sony Vaio Pentium 4 1.8 ghz)
I have iTunes on the PC now and I love it while using the PC.
I have read many complain of the slow nature of windows resizing on OSX with iTunes.
I can say that on my PC it is slow as well. The question is: Did Apple write the code to make the window resize slow or is this just the nature of the metalic window mac or PC ?
Either way window resizing is slow on PC too.
Any others here have iTunes on a PC if you have a PC? Have you noticed the same thing?
Of course it would be funny if Apple did make the PC version of iTunes slow to resize as to give comfort to Mac owners. What if it was lightning fast resizing but Apple did not want the world to know?
Just asking
Fellows
I have iTunes on the PC now and I love it while using the PC.
I have read many complain of the slow nature of windows resizing on OSX with iTunes.
I can say that on my PC it is slow as well. The question is: Did Apple write the code to make the window resize slow or is this just the nature of the metalic window mac or PC ?
Either way window resizing is slow on PC too.
Any others here have iTunes on a PC if you have a PC? Have you noticed the same thing?
Of course it would be funny if Apple did make the PC version of iTunes slow to resize as to give comfort to Mac owners. What if it was lightning fast resizing but Apple did not want the world to know?
Just asking
Fellows
Comments
Here is a review from a PC perspective that I found on a Google search:
iTunes review from a PC perspective
If you read the link above you will notice that the author noticed the "slow" windows resize issue on iTunes for PC.
Bottom line however is that I believe the author was impressed with the free product from Apple.
Well Done APPLE!!!!
Fellowship
Originally posted by FellowshipChurch iBook
Any others here have iTunes on a PC if you have a PC? Have you noticed the same thing?
Yes, I've noticed the same thing, and not just on iTunes for Windows (Quicktime, anyone?). I really can't speculate as to the reasons why since I'm a rank amateur when it comes to the technical side of this matter.
If you resize any other Windows window, you'll notice that the actual layout doesn't update instantaneously. It may lag by the better part of a second, depending on its complexity and the hardware you're running on. However, resizing feels instantaneous because Windows redraws the bounding box to match the mouse at any given instant and fills any unupdated areas with white space. In other words, the "much faster" resizing of Windows is an illusion (which is not to say that it's bad, or stupid - instant feedback is always a good thing).
If iTunes for Windows did that, it would gain the same benefits, and it would look like pure hell when you resized it, too.
Originally posted by FellowshipChurch iBook
Greetings, I have the iBook and I have the PC (Sony Vaio Pentium 4 1.8 ghz)
I own a 1.3Ghz Centrino laptop and resizing is flawlessly, much smoother than on my Tibook 400. One of my friends has no complains either.
My theory is as follows:
Apple very likely uses OpenGL to render the window and its content. That's the way they do on MacOS X and it seems they have ported over the Quartz (Extreme) libs instead of using DirectX or a native Win32 API.
If this assumption holds, the quality of resizing depends totally on your OpenGL implementation. My Centrino has no onboard gfx chip with shared RAM but an Radeon 9000 with 32MB dedicated RAM. On a GPU like this, OpenGL will be hardware-accelerated, whereas on a lesser gfx-chip or one with bad drivers a software renderer might be used. The performance difference might be tenfold or something.
What are the specs of your sonys GPU? Can you check if it uses a hardware OpenGL renderer?
But then I don't spend much time resizing anyway, iTunes is either running or it isn't.
Originally posted by Smircle
I own a 1.3Ghz Centrino laptop and resizing is flawlessly, much smoother than on my Tibook 400. One of my friends has no complains either.
My theory is as follows:
Apple very likely uses OpenGL to render the window and its content. That's the way they do on MacOS X and it seems they have ported over the Quartz (Extreme) libs instead of using DirectX or a native Win32 API.
If this assumption holds, the quality of resizing depends totally on your OpenGL implementation. My Centrino has no onboard gfx chip with shared RAM but an Radeon 9000 with 32MB dedicated RAM. On a GPU like this, OpenGL will be hardware-accelerated, whereas on a lesser gfx-chip or one with bad drivers a software renderer might be used. The performance difference might be tenfold or something.
What are the specs of your sonys GPU? Can you check if it uses a hardware OpenGL renderer?
I believe you have solved the whole issue!!! Great work Smircle!
Fellows
I'm sure iTunes just uses Win32 and its drawing systems and has a few refresh override tricks.
But window resizing is affected if your drivers for your video card in windows are incorrect, as general 2D is accelerated by your graphics card (uninstall your drivers and try moving/resizing any window as an example). This is nothing new really, windows that are drawn in graphics contexts are sent to the graphics card compressed and decompressed on the fly through the graphics card's 2D drawing system, so the blitting is fast (without the drivers this cannot happen). Quartz extreme makes use of the graphics card's 3D system to composite even faster.
Of course nowadays 2D performance of graphics cards has plateau and we often forget that 2D was once slow.
Originally posted by chych
Ehhh you can't really 'port' the quartz extreme libraries to Windows as it is inherent to the operating system and the display system; it's like trying to 'port' cocoa to windows or something like that.
Excellent comparison. In fact, Cocoa is the evolution of the NeXT OpenStep API which has been ported to windows as well. Search for YellowBox, OpenStep and Windows NT if you don't believe me.
my dual Athlon 2600 with radeon 9700 Pro renders fullscreen at 17FPS, while my other PC Xp2000 with built in shared ram graphics 'Savage chipset' renders at 15 FPS. Window resizing is pretty lame on both. Still a great app though. My old G4 400 rendered pretty much the same score, sometimes I got up to 70+FPS with faster-rougher,