QUARTZ HARDWARE ACCEL!! - Page 4

Amorph, why is everyone saying the Rage 128 can't cut it? What SPECIFIC features of the nVIDIA and Radeon cards are recquired? I realize this is all very soon, and perhaps the info isn't out, but it would be nice if Apple or someone could provide specifics. Quartz Extreme looks so awesome! If I could merely shift the work to the GPU, the CPU would be freed a lot. And that in and of itself is "acceleration." You know what I mean?

Um, Aquatik, take a look at the second post in this thread.

More to the point, T&L.

Translucency and lighting. Believe it or not, it's a fairly recent advance in GPUs. Note that first word... now, why do you think it might be necessary for Quartz Extreme?



Face it folks, there are some good solid looking technical reasons why they have the specs they do. Deal with it... no one's out to get you.

This time.

Muahahahaha.

[quote]Originally posted by Kate:
<strong>This is the main cause for todays trouble and for alienating Mac users.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I disagree. I think the non-platinum GUI is causing a lot more frustration for these "alienated" users.

[quote]<strong>What I still am failing to see are the benefits of Quartz/Aqua. We still run all 2D aspects of X 400% slower than under 9 and I see no advantage for doing so. Could someone point out any benefit gained by using Quartz compared to any other 2D drawing technology? I.e, Quickdraw(full graphics card support and acceleration), OpenGL(dito).</strong><hr></blockquote>

I thnk it's amatter of seeing applications of Quartz. Obviously, part of it was for eye-candy to, as you point out, move hardware. But Applications (appropriate choice of terms) such as iPhoto and the coming Universal Access rely heavily on the technology. For me, the new Universal Access options are the biggest boon to Quartz so far. I think the point of all of this, OS X in general, is to open door where there were nonoe before. You couldn't even consider that stuff before unless you wrote your own engine that supported it, and then got it avbailable to everyone else -- well, Apple did just that. So I think there are only a handful of examples (see also toolbar graphics scripts from the Applescript site) that really show the positive benefits of Quartz right now, but the potential above and beyond QuickDraw et al is the ultimate benefit. It's up to developers and Apple to find more applications for the rendering engine (and I suspect Apple has more up their sleeve).

I thnk the real danger is to stand in place, to say that something is good enough as is. It's like when 480k on an IBM PC was considered to be good enough for anyone, why would you ever need more?

[quote]Originally posted by Kickaha:
<strong>More to the point, T&L.

Translucency and lighting. Believe it or not, it's a fairly recent advance in GPUs. Note that first word... now, why do you think it might be necessary for Quartz Extreme?

</strong><hr></blockquote>

Actually, with respect to 3D video cards T&L stands for Transform and Lighting, not translucency and lighting.

[quote]
why not? put a radeon or gf2 in there! hell, slap in a geforce3 and dual gig that sucker! although then you'd need a fan too... while you're at it 120GB that hard drive, weeeeee! 1.5GB that ram!

the cube is massively upgradeable and a hardware hackers dream, a challenge <hr></blockquote>
yeah just found that out, notice my post where i say: does anyone know where i can get one for a decent price.

OMFG You have got to be kidding me right?

Live postscript composition rendered in OpenGL providing beautiful onscreen effects that enhance and extend the user-experience in everything from development to games to high-volume digital production.

Mathematica LOVES Quartz and can do things in it that are unavailable anywhere else.... And that is only one example.

I am sure there are many more examples (amongst them WYSIWYG fonts etc.)

Keep in mind that there has been a paradigm shift in how things are going to be in modern operating systems. No your Quadra will not be able to run it. Hell, given the advancement of technology the machine your bought yesterday will tomorrow have problems with bleeding edge technologies. That is reality.

BTW, I find myself productively using a beige Artemis tower (333 MHz) running OS 9.2.2 in addition to my Pismo 500 running X 10.1.4.

Difference? One catches eyes and is a powerful little workhorse. One is a clunky POS that still can crank out the goodness. Difference is attributable almost solely to OS X being great and OS 9.2 being the good ol' ace-up-sleeve. Point: Both still very functional. If your machine can't hang in X, don't make it or you are wasting your time.

...

You're right.

Mea culpa.

I've had under four hours of sleep, and not nearly enough caffeine.

I'm just gonna go crawl back in my latte mug now...

Listen: games became so powerful that they NEEDED hardware acceleration just to become playable, and now you can't find a game that doesn't use hardware acceleration. I remember everyone flipping out then, too, but now it's commonplace. Months from now, when Jaguar is released, all the bitching will stop (more or less), and people will use what they have. You should be thankful Apple is a forward looking company that isn't held back by legacy like MS is.

Some people are frustratingly stubborn.

Does anybody know if VPC will run better in 10.2 due to the gpu handling quartz?

sc_market, that's what I'd like to know. As well as why friggin' VPC has nvver used video cards that come with Macs. Why doesn't VPC use Mac video cards?

BuonRotto wrote:
&gt; &gt; &gt;
I thnk it's amatter of seeing applications of Quartz. Obviously, part of it was for eye-candy to, as you point out, move hardware. But Applications (appropriate choice of terms) such as iPhoto and the coming Universal Access rely heavily on the technology. For me, the new Universal Access options are the biggest boon to Quartz so far. I think the point of all of this, OS X in general, is to open door where there were nonoe before. You couldn't even consider that stuff before unless you wrote your own engine that supported it, and then got it avbailable to everyone else -- well, Apple did just that. So I think there are only a handful of examples (see also toolbar graphics scripts from the Applescript site) that really show the positive benefits of Quartz right now, but the potential above and beyond QuickDraw et al is the ultimate benefit. It's up to developers and Apple to find more applications for the rendering engine (and I suspect Apple has more up their sleeve).

I thnk the real danger is to stand in place, to say that something is good enough as is. It's like when 480k on an IBM PC was considered to be good enough for anyone, why would you ever need more?
&lt; &lt; &lt;

I think there is a flaw in this reasoning. Namely, in iPhoto, what is it that Quartz allows this program to do that is so special? Just the scaling of icons in real time? That's nice, but... it's slow unless your hardware is really fancy. I mean, the thing about extra RAM is that programs can use it to do stuff you want them to do. But, giving a drop shadow to a window, or a fake 3D look to a scroll bar button, it doesn't improve the actual functionality of that interface element. We had Kaleidescope for OS 9, and we could install all that junk if we wanted to, but it just slows your computer down. So I never used it.

Why does it take 32 MB of VRAM and the ability to do lighting and shadows to render a basic GUI? It doesn't. See, Apple's philosophy is not to make something useful and fast. Their philosphy has become the same philosophy that video game designers have -- write your graphics to take advantage of the latest hardware, so that the game's graphics will be the best possible. But with games, that's OK, because you understand that your computer might not run the latest games as fast as possible. But with the OS, and its GUI, we would not expect the same design philosophy as goes into video games; we would expect them to write the software for the lowest common denominator, so that it runs well on all current systems.

You see, with a video game, you do not have a current customer base that you have to please. But Apple has a huge current customer base that wants to be pleased, including me. And I'm very displeased that Apple is not designing its OS to run well on the very computers that it is expecting its customers to run the OS on. I mean, my computer came with Mac OS X already installed, and it lacks hardware acceleration, but should have it. Same with the iBooks, same with the iMacs.

What will Apple gain by continuing to provide its customers with inferior products, or even worse, by obviously catering only to those customers which purchase its most high-end systems, while leaving "the rest of us" in the dust? That is offensive and it doesn't make me feel like staying with the platform. It's about customer service, not about "keeping ahead of the curve." Behind technology, are the people who use it. That's what the original Mac was about.

But I get the distinct impression that Apple today is less concerned with its end users, and more concerned with making the most high-tech advanced thing out there. Apple should not get too far ahead of itself, and of its own customers.

&gt; &gt; &gt;
posted 05-07-2002 04:41 PM Â*Â*Â* Â*Â* Â*Â* Â*Â* Â*Â* Â* Â* Â*Â*
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quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Aquatik:
But, does anyone here think it's odd that Quartz Extreme doesn't apply to currently SHIPPING iBooks, CRT iMacs, and the just recently updated PBG4!?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Think of Quartz Extreme as being like AltiVec: If it's there, you get a speed boost. If it's not, you don't. But all the panicking about whether your computer is not supported is silly. Almost all iBook owners - and all iceBook owners - bought their machines knowing that they were trading off a major software accelerator (AltiVec) for a small, cool, efficient laptop. This is just more of the same. Jaguar should still be an unambiguous improvement to any iBook.
&lt; &lt; &lt;

I have to say, this is a bunch of B.S. Why? Because Apple should have hardware acceleration for all GUI functions in OS X on all computers that have hardware accelerators, like the iBook. They should milk it for what it has. But instead, they go for the gold and alienate these users. Sure, they'll see a little speed improvement from code optimization, but their GPU's will sit unused by the Finder, by scrolling programs, etc. forever because Apple was too LAZY to write hardware acceleration drivers for all their computers, which is a problem caused by the fact that their GUI is unnecessarily processor instensive to begin with, due to ephemera like transparency and drop shadows that does nothing to help you get your work done faster.

[quote]Originally posted by philter:

<strong>But, giving a drop shadow to a window, or a fake 3D look to a scroll bar button, it doesn't improve the actual functionality of that interface element.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Actually, drop shadows make it possible to where windows began and ended, and what they were on top of. Which is why every window in every MacOS has had a drop shadow (the Aqua ones are just prettier).

The 3D-ish scrollbars aren't slowing anything down. The really meaty stuff - double-buffering, PDF rendering, compositing - is where Quartz takes a speed hit. But all of those bring obvious advantages as well. Not all of those advantages are obvious to users, but that doesn't make them less significant (think developers).

[quote]<strong>Why does it take 32 MB of VRAM and the ability to do lighting and shadows to render a basic GUI? It doesn't.</strong><hr></blockquote>

No, it doesn't.

If it did, Quartz wouldn't work on anything with less than 32MB of VRAM. So, uh...

[quote]<strong>[Apple's] philosphy has become the same philosophy that video game designers have -- write your graphics to take advantage of the latest hardware, so that the game's graphics will be the best possible. But with games, that's OK, because you understand that your computer might not run the latest games as fast as possible.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Actually, this is 100% wrong. A few games with relatively small markets push the envelope, but most games target 1 or 2 video card generations behind, so that they can sell more games. Any game that can get away with it eschews hardware acceleration altogether. The Mac porting houses target iMacs.

[quote]<strong>But with the OS, and its GUI, we would not expect the same design philosophy as goes into video games; we would expect them to write the software for the lowest common denominator, so that it runs well on all current systems. </strong><hr></blockquote>

It runs well on all current systems. Come Jaguar, it'll run even better. Quartz Extreme just means that it'll run especially well on higher end systems.

[quote]<strong>I mean, my computer came with Mac OS X already installed, and it lacks hardware acceleration, but should have it. Same with the iBooks, same with the iMacs.</strong><hr></blockquote>

What can be accelerated is being accelerated. Quartz Extreme is not an all or nothing proposition. You've been told this several times now. It's an enhancement, not a baseline. It's harder to accelerate Quartz than QuickDraw because Quartz is doing a lot more work.

[quote]<strong>What will Apple gain by continuing to provide its customers with inferior products, or even worse, by obviously catering only to those customers which purchase its most high-end systems, while leaving "the rest of us" in the dust?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Wait for 10.2, install it on your machine, and tell me if you feel "left in the dust." This rhetoric is hopelessly overblown.

Apple is pushing into higher-end markets than it has ever tried to enter before. That means that they'd better be able to exploit high-end hardware. That means that they'll offer features that only exploit high-end hardware. That doesn't mean they're forgetting everyone else, it means that they're hoping you're smart enough to realize that an iBook is not intended to be a fire-breathing workstation.

[quote]<strong>But I get the distinct impression that Apple today is less concerned with its end users, and more concerned with making the most high-tech advanced thing out there.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Funny; Apple seems to be picking up end users at a much higher rate these days.

Somewhat on-topic... just placed my order for the AGP nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 for $337. As far as I know... this is the "Best" you can get currently... right...?

EDIT: Actually... I just cancelled the order. Another thread stated that this card will NOT work in my G4 because it is not a "Mac" card... something about needing to get it from Apple... the retail versions are all PC... is this true...? Either way... I cancelled to be safe.

[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Scott F. ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by philter:
<strong>
I have to say, this is a bunch of B.S. Why? Because Apple should have hardware acceleration for all GUI functions in OS X on all computers that have hardware accelerators, like the iBook. They should milk it for what it has. But instead, they go for the gold and alienate these users. Sure, they'll see a little speed improvement from code optimization, but their GPU's will sit unused by the Finder, by scrolling programs, etc. forever because Apple was too LAZY to write hardware acceleration drivers for all their computers, which is a problem caused by the fact that their GUI is unnecessarily processor instensive to begin with, due to ephemera like transparency and drop shadows that does nothing to help you get your work done faster.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Jesus Christ, do you realize how offensive you are being? Not to mention ignorant! I'm not saying you are stupid or unintelligent... I can say completely honestly that I'm positive there are subjects where you are considerably more knowledgable than I. However, right now you are talking out of your a**. First, the graphics accelerator in the iBook is being used! Right now! Don't you remember the big hoopla over RagePro not being supported in the older iMacs, and only the Rage128 being accelerated? Well, guess what? The iceBook has a Rage128, and its 2D acceleration capabilities are fully used by Mac OS X Public Beta or higher. Its 3D capabilities are fully used by any OpenGL-compatible software you care to run. However, it physically lacks certain features, in the hardware, necessary for Quartz Extreme. Apple could assign one million programmers and work on it from now until the year 40,000AD and it still wouldn't work with Quartz Extreme. Laziness has nothing to do with it. You are literally asking for the impossible, and showing off your ignorance of computer science in the process. I don't know what you do for a living (but I'm going to guess it has something to do with graphic arts...), but I don't lecture you about it. Don't lecture the people at Apple (and no, I don't work for Apple, but I am a developer) about their job when you know nothing about it. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine... why does everyone think they know everything about software development? Sorry if I sound a bit snappy.

Thanks,
Shadow Knight

I have to say that the idea of Quartz Extreme is a rahter good idea. People who are irritated by it seem to be irritated by the fact that it will not be available to more machines.

Usually, a machine's GPU is used primarialy for games. When you buy your new GeForce board, you get some great gaming performance. People do not look forward to scrolling when they get a new video card, they look forward to a higher Quake frame count. Quartz Extreme leverages the hardware that is already in (most) computers- hardware that is mostly unused by the standard OS GUI. When we sit down and look at what Apple is doing, we realize that they just managed to speed up many of the things in OS X that users complain about, with no additional hardware and with no faster CPU's.

People who say that there should be a standard graphics chip that is in every Mac are speaking nonsense. There is ALREADY a graphic chip that can make Quartz fly (it is made by either Nvidia or ATI). Having ATI or Nvidia design and fab a Quartz accelerator saves Apple an enormous ammount of money.

Yes, it is a pain that not all OSX boxes will support this new feature, but you need to remember that it is an accelerator on a future release of OS X, not a standard feature on previous versions of OS X. It is also a feature that will not be available until the release of Jaguar.

I think that the only sticking point is that the current iBooks will not be able to use it, but this may be a clue as to what is coming up in the iBook line (esp. since it needs a refreshing- my GUESS would be before the next school year starts).

[quote]Originally posted by chromos:
<strong>

I don't know what metrics you're using to determine "half functionality", but I find OS X window widgets to be more functional than their OS 9 counterparts. Here's why: you can close a background window without first having to click on it to give it focus. That's one click in OS X versus two in OS 9. So I say that OS X widgets are twice as functional as OS 9 ones are. </strong><hr></blockquote>

EXACTLY! This is great for closing those little popups and whatnot. Classic windows also don't have the hide toolbar button. I love the X window widgets. (They also look much better IMHO, if you don't like the color set it to graphite. Color doesn't make it half as functional by any metric.)

"What I still am failing to see are the benefits of Quartz/Aqua."

Nah.

No point making a list Kate.

If you don't 'see' them, then anybody making a list isn't going to help you...

Lemon Bon Bon :eek:

"When we sit down and look at what Apple is doing, we realize that they just managed to speed up many of the things in OS X that users complain about, with no additional hardware and with no faster CPU's."

Nice one, Apple!

Lemon Bon Bon :cool:

[quote]Originally posted by Kate:
<strong>All this "extreme" (LOL) business would be void if Apple had not opted for the Quartz/Aqua thing. This is the main cause for todays trouble and for alienating Mac users.

What I still am failing to see are the benefits of Quartz/Aqua. We still run all 2D aspects of X 400% slower than under 9 and I see no advantage for doing so. Could someone point out any benefit gained by using Quartz compared to any other 2D drawing technology? I.e, Quickdraw(full graphics card support and acceleration), OpenGL(dito) .

The only pay off of Quartz seen by anyone is that it pays off for Apples hardware sales. There is neither a need nor a payoff nor any usable advantage by using a suchlike drawing model IMHO. Any help or insight? Only disadvantages weigh in so far as I am concerned and Apple is trying to cure the sickness by rising minimum hardware specs, which in my view is admitting that the decision for Quartz was premature.

It is sad that Apple delivered tech is a drawback rather than a move forward. But I would be less disappointed if anyone could provide a list of current and future advantages of Quartz that really outweigh all this hassle and pain. Anyone? </strong><hr></blockquote>

There is no advantage for current users, other than to feel like an ass for buying a current machine that can't even properly handle Apples new OS. There aren't many 3D GAMES that require a 32Mb Video card. Its almost unfathomable that an OS would have that requirement for optimal performance. I don't mind the AGP requirement, but to not support ATI 128 cards with 16 Mb is ludicrous. Try buying anything other than an ATI Radeon Card for a Mac. I don't see any Nvidia Cards out there for a Mac in the $100 range at all. If Apple were smart they would put a $100 Nvidia 32mb Card on their Web Site for all us shmucks who didn't think Apple would abandon us. And don't tell me that 10.2 will be faster even if our cards aren't 32Mb-they explicitly state that Quartz Extreme requires certain Graphics cards. Its ridiculous.

[quote]Originally posted by steve666:
<strong>There aren't many 3D GAMES that require a 32Mb Video card.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Games don't have textures the size of your average window.

[quote]<strong>And don't tell me that 10.2 will be faster even if our cards aren't 32Mb-they explicitly state that Quartz Extreme requires certain Graphics cards.</strong><hr></blockquote>

10.2 will be faster even if your card isn't 32MB, because Quartz Extreme is not the only possible way that Jaguar can - or will - speed up OS X. Hint: Quartz is not the only thing slowing OS X down. QE is not just the same thing sped up, it's a whole new level of power available to those machines that can handle it. Those machines that can't will get plain old Quartz. To the extent that a Rage 128 can accelerate Quartz, it will. In fact, it already does.

The general consensus here, prior to Jobs' keynote, was that it was effectively impossible to accelerate Quartz on current GPUs. Some hoped for a special chipset dedicated to accelerating Quartz. Both of these scenarios leave all current hardware out in the cold - and the latter would mean that the towers couldn't even be upgraded to handle Quartz acceleration! Apple did better than any of the better informed folks here thought they would. Think about that before you go off about how lazy or incompetent or uncaring Apple is.

Worst case, your Mac is no less functional today than it was yesterday. It'll be more functional after you install Jaguar, even if it can't avail itself of a feature intended for high-end workstations. Doesn't look so bad to me. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

[quote]Its almost unfathomable that an OS would have that requirement for optimal performance.<hr></blockquote>
BAFPCT

[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Guitarbloke ]</p>

I'm going to post this from a post on MacNN, because it's something that needs to be said (BTW, a big Hey! to all the other folks I see 'round here that are also on MacNN):

[quote]Originally posted by orbit:

<strong>look, i haven't posted here in awhile, but you people are just too stupid. you've roped me in...

why on EARTH would apple just arbitrarily decide not to support pci cards if there was no valid technical reason for doing so? to insinuate anything to this effect is just idiotic, i'm sorry. ok now read this next part really carefully because it may hurt your brain...

quartz extreme does its magic by compositing the entire interface in openGL. this being the case, it needs to render everything as a mapped polygon, which doesn't seem so hard until you begin to realize the texture sizes we're talking about. modern video cards, and we're talking about the really fast ones here, can't handle textures of more than 256x256 pixels per object... anything more is usually not supported, as it would quickly populate scenes with way too much texture data. the main bottleneck in 3d applications right now is *not* with the processor, contrary to popular belief, but with memory bandwidth. the entire thing gets bogged down when texture data is being piped from system memory to video memory.

now, also note that you usually can't just swap out one texture- if any texture needs to be reloaded, the entired contents of VRAM are flushed, and the agonizingly slow process of transferring system memory contents to VRAM takes place before the next screen can be displayed.

now, think about what it means to have each window, with a *huge* amount of pixels in each one, relative to the aforementioned texture maps, mapped onto a polygon. if one window changes contents, VRAM needs to be flushed. this would simply not work on a PCI system. you would get 3 frames per second if you were lucky. the bandwidth just isn't there, not to mention the fact that it's not a dedicated bus.

AGP is a direct, high speed channel between system memory and VRAM. its whole reason for existing is to provide a low-latency pathway for texture information to offload to the video card. without AGP, there would simply be no way to work with the huge amounts of texture data needed in something like quartz extreme. quite frankly, there were many people with much more knowledge than myself who were skeptical of whether or not anyone could actually accomplish it.

apple has done just that, and now you're whining as if you know more than their engineers? that's just asinine. i'm sorry, but ask questions if you don't have the whole picture, rather than shooting off some ill-informed argument which will only serve to needlessly confuse and anger people.</strong><hr></blockquote>

[quote]Originally posted by Gee-Man:

<strong>Orbit has it 100% correct - the bandwidth to support Quartz windows as OpenGL texture maps at high resolutions (i.e. 1280x1024 or even higher) IS NOT AVAILABLE using PCI video cards. I don't know why you won't accept that fact and you seem to think Apple is simply lying to you.

Games like Quake III are a different story, since the texture maps are much smaller than OS windows and therefore the strain on the bus isn't anywhere near as great. Those of us telling you that Apple is telling the truth, for easily proven technical reasons, are not simply trying to apologize for Apple or blow smoke up your a s s. Can you at least try to accept this and move on?
</strong><hr></blockquote>

EDIT: And before anybody comes back asking "Okay, if it's AGP that's important, why won't my iBook work?? APPLE IS LAZY!!," I think the safe money is on that Quartz Extreme requires hardware instructions that are simply not present in cards before the Radeon and GeForce families.

[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Spirit_VW ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by Amorph:
<strong>
The general consensus here, prior to Jobs' keynote, was that it was effectively impossible to accelerate Quartz on current GPUs. Some hoped for a special chipset dedicated to accelerating Quartz. Both of these scenarios leave all current hardware out in the cold - and the latter would mean that the towers couldn't even be upgraded to handle Quartz acceleration! Apple did better than any of the better informed folks here thought they would. Think about that before you go off about how lazy or incompetent or uncaring Apple is.

Worst case, your Mac is no less functional today than it was yesterday. It'll be more functional after you install Jaguar, even if it can't avail itself of a feature intended for high-end workstations. Doesn't look so bad to me. :confused:

[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</strong><hr></blockquote>


Said better than I could have.

Well actually that wasn't the early consensus for a few of us.

Bearing in mind that I know almost nothing about anything technical, I pretty much was the first to insist that GUI help would come in the form of tight ties to OpenGL.

Did I have an inkling how they'd do it? Nope. But when people insisted (and kept on insisting over the course of months) that a new 'Raycer' chip was needed to speed GUI performance I knew it was not going to happen that way. Too complicated, especially when an untapped resource is sitting right there in the form of a GPU. It just needed the right hooks I said, which is essentially what we got.

Go back and check the record.

Listen to Matsu, I know not of what I speak. <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />

I have no problems with Apple making AGP a requirement, after all, thats the focal point of their new graphics architecture. I happen to dig my G4 -its a beautiful piece of hardware, quiet, and works damn great in OS9. To be honest-OSX is not THAT bad for regular tasks, mainly internet usage. If i could be certain that 10.2 would improve things without my having a new graphics card I could live with it. What I really want is a Nvidia 32 mb Card for around $100. PC users can get one for $80 right now. Apple should make sure that they are available for mac users also. Its a little difficult with Nvidia because they don't actually build the cards, unlike ATI-which is a manufacturer. All Apple has to do is take some their OEM cards that go into the iMac and eMac and make them available to us for purchase at the Apple Store for those of us who don't need the latest and greatest (and expensive) cards.Not too unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?

[quote]Originally posted by steve666:
<strong>I have no problems with Apple making AGP a requirement, after all, thats the focal point of their new graphics architecture. I happen to dig my G4 -its a beautiful piece of hardware, quiet, and works damn great in OS9. To be honest-OSX is not THAT bad for regular tasks, mainly internet usage. If i could be certain that 10.2 would improve things without my having a new graphics card I could live with it. What I really want is a Nvidia 32 mb Card for around $100. PC users can get one for $80 right now. Apple should make sure that they are available for mac users also. Its a little difficult with Nvidia because they don't actually build the cards, unlike ATI-which is a manufacturer. All Apple has to do is take some their OEM cards that go into the iMac and eMac and make them available to us for purchase at the Apple Store for those of us who don't need the latest and greatest (and expensive) cards.Not too unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Latest reports of leaked builds from MacNN <a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=46&t=006017" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=46&t=006014" target="_blank">here</a> suggests that Quartz Extreme works on RAGE 128 based hardware to a certain extent since I can see no other explanation for the large performance increases these people are getting.

Or perhaps Quartz Extreme isn't running and plain Quartz is now just twice as fast overnight.

Most are reporting a massive boost in Aqua performance from hardware ranging from G3-based Pismo PowerBooks to 3 year old G4's. Users of leaked builds are suggesting that OS 10.2 is at OS 9's level in speed.

[ 05-09-2002: Message edited by: Nostradamus ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by steve666:
<strong> What I really want is a Nvidia 32 mb Card for around $100. [...] All Apple has to do is take some their OEM cards that go into the iMac and eMac and make them available to us for purchase at the Apple Store for those of us who don't need the latest and greatest (and expensive) cards.Not too unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?</strong><hr></blockquote>

With the caveat that you mean "the cards that go into the PowerMacs," I think that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think Apple will do it unless they're poked by a lot of people to do it (hint, hint).

Just FYI, the iMac and the eMac don't have video cards per se. Their video acceleration is handled by a single chip soldered to the motherboard and to an AGP bus (not a slot, just a bus - traces on a motherboard), and any relevant connectors. You could ask Apple to ship you one of those, but unless the chip they send you is pin-compatible with the one you have, and you're an ace with a soldering iron, it won't do you a bit of good.



Good news, Nostradamus! I hope that it's so.

[ 05-09-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

I am JUST a little tired of people whining about QE not being supported on their year-old (even month old...I don't care) computer.

Alright. Time to be realistic.

Hyopthetical: I am Apple. I make my fortune selling new computers to people. I am making a cutting-edge OS. What machines am I going to target?

NOT machines that are 1 year old.
Not machines that are 2 months old.
I target the FUTURE machines that the OS will run on.

Schwaguar isn't even out yet and people are screaming and running around like flaming monkeys. STOP DROP AND ROLL PEOPLE!

Realize that if Apple targeted 2/3 month old machines (read 6 month old by the time Jaguar is publicly released) with their bleeding edge technology developments, no one would buy their new machines which the OS is targeted for in the first place.

I think it is also a good indication that people are seeing VAST speed improvements (at least in user experience) on machines that don't support QE. GEE, if you look at posts from the smarter folk out there (most of them developers by the smell, trail of empty Jolt bottles, etc. ), you will find that they have be reiterating time and time again that the speed improvements in Jag are NOT LIMITED TO QE. In fact, I would say as exciting as QE is, it is one of the least things I am excited for (and not only because my pismo won't support it). The new gcc will do AMAZING things to speed EVERYWHERE.

So much hype over acceleration of Quartz, when once again it is the underpinning advancement that really makes this upgrade special. i.e. QE affects Quartz, gcc 3.1 affects EVERYTHING THAT IS COMPILED.

Sheesh...

Wow, what a war... mostly being fought by people responding in a knee-jerk, and uneducated fashion. No offense is meant by "uneducated" -- there is usually no reason for people to understand the ins and outs of hardware graphics. How about some facts... I know a few of these have been stated, but they bear repeating since so many people seem to ignore them:

- Quartz will still run on machines that don't have the required graphics hardware. It will probably run faster than it currently does due to optimizations to the Quartz code, improvements to the compiler Apple uses, and general speed ups in the machine.

- In no way does Quartz Extreme make your current hardware any less capable!!!

- Upgrade your machine's RAM if you only have 128 megs because graphics are probably not what's slowing you down... it just looks like it because graphics is what you see and virtual memory swapping isn't.

- Hardware acceleration is a delicate thing... it is easy for developers to do things which make the hardware actually run slower than it would in software. I've seen many cases where games try to use RagePro level graphics and run slower than the software rendered version of the game. We call these "hardware decelerators". Even brand new cards can be brought to their knees by doing things that they just aren't good at. Apple has clearly taken its time and carefully implemented Quartz Extreme so that it operates in a manner that can be accelerated ... but doing this requires certain hardware support.

- 32 megs of VRAM is recommended mostly likely because they want to fit the frame buffer, a draw buffer, and cache some windows or other textures in VRAM. If they do this the graphics chip doesn't have to go to main memory across the AGP bus (a slow process) all the time in order to draw. It'll run with less, just not as well... and I'd bet that running at higher resolutions with smaller VRAM cards will slow it down even more. At some point the cost of going across the bus is going to slow it down so much it would have been better just to be using the old Quartz. Hopefully QE just detects that this is the case and turns itself off automatically.

- An AGP bus is required because PCI didn't support the graphics card reading images from main memory. Even with a 32 meg card not all of the images can be stored in VRAM, and they probably don't want to be since the CPU is still drawing much of the content and moving that to VRAM would really kill performance. They say AGP2x so I have to wonder if that is because there was a limitation in their first AGP implementation, or if they feel that the speed of the AGP1x just isn't good enough to actually get acceleration. PCI just plain can't do the required reads or writes.

- I've read that the Rage128 can't be used (at least not fully). I don't know the reason for sure, but I seem to recall that ATI didn't properly support the AGP feature I describe above until the Radeon came along.

- T&L is transform and lighting, neither of which is needed in a 2D compositing engine. Transform refers taking the geometry of a 3D model and computing its position in the rendered scene, and where that places it on the screen. This is important for 3D since otherwise the CPU has to do that work.

- Quartz is a very good thing because it was designed for the new operating system environment. The old QuickDraw simply could not exist in a pre-emptive protected mode multitasking system, and so a new graphics engine had to be built. Apple wisely built one that will take them into the future a long time so that they can avoid another transition like this one for quite some time. They also built in a lot of features developers have been asking for almost since color graphics first arrived. There are certain costs associated with having an advanced OS, and 2D graphics suffers compared to a non-advanced OS. Part of the reason for this is that in MacOS9 the processor would go directly to the graphics hardware and play -- and any use of the graphics accelerator was very simplistic and limited, thus the limited nature of graphics in the GUI (no transparency, no curves, minimal animations, etc). Switching to Quartz both provides support for the new OS (making it robust and reliable, among other things) as well as adding advanced new features. Unfortunately this has a serious cost, and since the first versions of Quartz didn't use the hardware (or at least didn't use it very aggressively) performance took a big hit. Quartz Extreme should largely address this, and may make it faster than MacOS9 ever could be since it'll leverage the powerful graphics hardware to a much greater extent.

- The MacOSX OpenGL is slightly slower than the MacOS9 OpenGL, but since it is now the foundation for Quartz Extreme I expect they are going to spend a lot of effort making it faster. They already were actually, and I've heard that the MacOSX OpenGL implementation has already been optimized and enhanced and this will be in Jaguar as well.

- Just to re-iterate: Apple is not being lazy in its support of graphics chips. These chips simple cannot be used to speed up the kind of graphics that Quartz is doing. If they tried then it would run slower if it could run at all. Quartz is doing what it does because Apple designed it to be their platform for the next 10 years, which is a lot more important than making something that is only as capable as the current Windows GUI. They chose the hardware cut off point because of technical reasons that nobody can do anything about without selling you new hardware.

- People who had just bought a new Macintosh Quadra felt the same way when the first PowerPCs arrived, and the first native PowerPC apps started showing up. Deal with it.

if then requirement is based on Hardware Transform and Lighting than Powerbook Gigabit (rev 2) owners are out of luck. the Radeon mobility does not have the T&L unit. the radeon 7500 mobility does.

[quote]Originally posted by Programmer:
<strong>
They say AGP2x so I have to wonder if that is because there was a limitation in their first AGP implementation, or if they feel that the speed of the AGP1x just isn't good enough to actually get acceleration.</strong><hr></blockquote>

It might be that, or it might be simpler: I'm pretty sure that Apple has never shipped an AGP 1x machine (maybe the original iBook? but I don't think so). They went from PCI to AGP 2x.

[quote]Originally posted by Amorph:
<strong>
It might be that, or it might be simpler: I'm pretty sure that Apple has never shipped an AGP 1x machine (maybe the original iBook? but I don't think so). They went from PCI to AGP 2x.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Heh. I'm a little surprised that they'd say anything except just plain "AGP" then. Maybe there is a x86 version after all. <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />


As for the hardware T&L being required by QE: I'd be very skeptical of this. Any G4 can do the transform calculations (if they are even used by the 2D engine) in software plenty fast for the amount of geometry being processed in the 2D engine, so there shouldn't be a need for hardware to do it. The lighting support isn't needed at all by the 2D engine. The existing OpenGL implementation hides the existance of T&L hardware from the developer quite effectively.


Oh, and one point that I missed above: QE will accelerate the graphics because all of these graphics engines can do the actual pixel blitting faster than the G4 can blast the data across the bus. The parallelism on older hardware might not be as great as you'd expect because of memory contention and the time the G4 spends telling the hardware what to do. All those images still need to be blasted across the bus, and if the graphics engine is reading from the MPX bus then the G4 isn't. Larger VRAM and faster system memory will see more and more parallelism. New graphics chips are also better at playing back pre-recorded sets of drawing instructions completely on their own.

If QE lives up to the potential in the latest graphics chips, MacOSX is going to go from having a dog of a GUI to having the fastest one anybody has ever seen. Fun times.

[quote]Originally posted by Programmer:
<strong>

Heh. I'm a little surprised that they'd say anything except just plain "AGP" then. Maybe there is a x86 version after all. <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
</strong><hr></blockquote>

Confirmed! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />

Now, if DEC was still around, and we could have OS X Server on Alpha... *drool*

[quote]<strong>The parallelism on older hardware might not be as great as you'd expect because of memory contention and the time the G4 spends telling the hardware what to do. All those images still need to be blasted across the bus, and if the graphics engine is reading from the MPX bus then the G4 isn't.</strong><hr></blockquote>

One more reason to be glad about the G4's big, fast, efficient caches, and thankful for locality of reference.

[quote]<strong>If QE lives up to the potential in the latest graphics chips, MacOSX is going to go from having a dog of a GUI to having the fastest one anybody has ever seen. Fun times. </strong><hr></blockquote>

I can't wait. I have to say, it's great fun to have a computer that gets faster as it gets older.

[ 05-09-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

&gt;Latest reports of leaked builds from MacNN here and here suggests that Quartz Extreme works on RAGE 128 based hardware to a certain extent since I can see no other explanation for the large performance increases these people are getting.

Or perhaps Quartz Extreme isn't running and plain Quartz is now just twice as fast overnight.

Most are reporting a massive boost in Aqua performance from hardware ranging from G3-based Pismo PowerBooks to 3 year old G4's. Users of leaked builds are suggesting that OS 10.2 is at OS 9's level in speed.&lt;

If 10.2 is as fast as OS9, I will be very happy indeed. Thats all I really want.

&gt;Hyopthetical: I am Apple. I make my fortune selling new computers to people. I am making a cutting-edge OS. What machines am I going to target?

NOT machines that are 1 year old.
Not machines that are 2 months old.
I target the FUTURE machines that the OS will run on.&lt;

Wrong attitude and bad business practices is not thee way to make a company with 5% marketshare grow. In fact, its quite foolish. If 10.2 speeds the OS up to the level of OS9 that would be good enough for most people. If having a better graphics card makes it even faster thats OK. But 10.2 should be a robust OS that recent models can use efficiently.

Any opinions on the ATI Radeon 7000 for the mac? I saw it costs $120, which isn't too bad. How does it match up to Nvidia(their 32Mb cards)?

Ok here it is. i was running 10.2 dp 1 on my G4 with a rage 128 pro video card it works fine tho im hopeing to upgrade soon.

[quote] I have no problems with Apple making AGP a requirement, after all, thats the focal point of their new graphics architecture. I happen to dig my G4 -its a beautiful piece of hardware, quiet, and works damn great in OS9. To be honest-OSX is not THAT bad for regular tasks, mainly internet usage. If i could be certain that 10.2 would improve things without my having a new graphics card I could live with it. What I really want is a Nvidia 32 mb Card for around $100. PC users can get one for $80 right now. Apple should make sure that they are available for mac users also. Its a little difficult with Nvidia because they don't actually build the cards, unlike ATI-which is a manufacturer. All Apple has to do is take some their OEM cards that go into the iMac and eMac and make them available to us for purchase at the Apple Store for those of us who don't need the latest and greatest (and expensive) cards.Not too unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?
<hr></blockquote>

well, maybe they'll announce this at MWNY, which is more than a month before the official Jaguar release, leaving plenty of time to get a new card.