I've got a G4 card in my Beige Mac and am wondering if there is some way to know if Jaguar is taking advantage of altivec... altivec programs (photoshop/altivec fractal) recognize altivec though...
Do you mean does AltiVec work on your specific Mac at all? Or does Jaguar utilize AltiVec?
If the former, then you seem to already know that you can use the <a href="http://daugerresearch.com/fractaldemos/altivecfractalcarbon.html"; target="_blank">AltiVec Fractal Carbon</a> app. If it can use AltiVec, it will run MUCH faster with a significantly higher number of FLOPs.
If the latter, yes, it certainly does. I don't think there is a way to test what uses it other than sitting a G3 next to a G4 of the same speed and comparing which operations run faster on the G4. I know the dock benefits from AltiVec. I'm not sure what else does, though.
The latter I meant, whether Finder was using altivec... before I hacked Quarts Extreme to work it seemed fairly similar to 10.1.1.5 in terms of responsiveness...
That's because there isn't much in the normal course of Finder operations that is going to benefit from AltiVec.
AltiVec isn't a universal panacea to make things faster, it just speeds up very specific types of operations. Now, those operations are precisely those that are needed by video, graphics, and sound manipulations, but it doesn't help for things like grabbing file info from disk.
In your case, the QE offloading compositing to the GPU was obviously a tighter bottleneck than any AltiVec operations, at least for the Finder.
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If the former, then you seem to already know that you can use the <a href="http://daugerresearch.com/fractaldemos/altivecfractalcarbon.html"; target="_blank">AltiVec Fractal Carbon</a> app. If it can use AltiVec, it will run MUCH faster with a significantly higher number of FLOPs.
If the latter, yes, it certainly does. I don't think there is a way to test what uses it other than sitting a G3 next to a G4 of the same speed and comparing which operations run faster on the G4. I know the dock benefits from AltiVec. I'm not sure what else does, though.
[ 08-29-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
AltiVec isn't a universal panacea to make things faster, it just speeds up very specific types of operations. Now, those operations are precisely those that are needed by video, graphics, and sound manipulations, but it doesn't help for things like grabbing file info from disk.
In your case, the QE offloading compositing to the GPU was obviously a tighter bottleneck than any AltiVec operations, at least for the Finder.