<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">
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.
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.
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?
<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>
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.
<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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]" />
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.
>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.<
If 10.2 is as fast as OS9, I will be very happy indeed. Thats all I really want.
>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.<
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.
[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 $80 right now. Apple should make sure that they are available for mac users also. Its a little difficult with Nvidia because they don't actually build the cards, unlike ATI-which is a manufacturer. All Apple has to do is take some their OEM cards that go into the iMac and eMac and make them available to us for purchase at the Apple Store for those of us who don't need the latest and greatest (and expensive) cards.Not too unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?
<hr></blockquote>
well, maybe they'll announce this at MWNY, which is more than a month before the official Jaguar release, leaving plenty of time to get a new card.
Wrong attitude and bad business practices is not thee way to make a company with 5% marketshare grow. In fact, its quite foolish. If 10.2 speeds the OS up to the level of OS9 that would be good enough for most people. If having a better graphics card makes it even faster thats OK. But 10.2 should be a robust OS that recent models can use efficiently.
<hr></blockquote>
Cute.
You don't happen to have an MBA do you? It would explain a lot...
Gee... Apple is a hardware company. How is advancing your OS on cutting-edge hardware going to hurt you? The cost of performance is new hardware, thus Apple sells more machines! (Its not like we won't buy them... cause you KNOW we will. <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> )
And don't start on Apple's business practices. Compared to M$, Apple is MUCH better w.r.t philosophy. Anyhow, Apple still cranks out the best OS/hardware integrated commercial computers out there. Your machine is a luxury device therefore is has luxury prices.
And while you are erroneously complaining, recall that Apple price/performace ratios are better now than they have been in a long time. I think I recall Steve saying about the $1,800 iMac G4, (not exact quote) "This machine would have run you $4,500 half a year ago."
Yes there are lots of factors in there (such as the fact that the REASON it was $4500 worth of equipment 6 months ago was because of Apple's jacked up prices in the first place.) But he has a good point. Macs are not the wastes of money they used to be. Period.
BTW, steve666, how exactly do you consider targeting old, aging computers with a bleeding edge OS good business practice? How is it the wrong attitude? How is it foolish? How is costly development for legacy systems going to pay for itself without new hardware sales? How is catering to you, the I-don't-want-to-buy-a-better-computer folk, going to gain them marketshare? You are already stading in their small percentage...
I am sorry. You are either shortsighted and angry cause you have an old computer (join the club on the old computer bit), or you just don't understand the not-so-subtle points involved in making money as a business, I guess... but which?
Comments
<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>
BAFPCT
[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Guitarbloke ]</p>
[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>
<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.
[ 05-08-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Said better than I could have.
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]" />
<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>
<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>
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.
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...
- 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.
<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.
<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.
<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.
I can't wait.
[ 05-09-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
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.<
If 10.2 is as fast as OS9, I will be very happy indeed. Thats all I really want.
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.<
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.
<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.
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.
<hr></blockquote>
Cute.
You don't happen to have an MBA do you? It would explain a lot...
Gee... Apple is a hardware company. How is advancing your OS on cutting-edge hardware going to hurt you? The cost of performance is new hardware, thus Apple sells more machines! (Its not like we won't buy them... cause you KNOW we will. <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> )
And don't start on Apple's business practices. Compared to M$, Apple is MUCH better w.r.t philosophy. Anyhow, Apple still cranks out the best OS/hardware integrated commercial computers out there. Your machine is a luxury device therefore is has luxury prices.
And while you are erroneously complaining, recall that Apple price/performace ratios are better now than they have been in a long time. I think I recall Steve saying about the $1,800 iMac G4, (not exact quote) "This machine would have run you $4,500 half a year ago."
Yes there are lots of factors in there (such as the fact that the REASON it was $4500 worth of equipment 6 months ago was because of Apple's jacked up prices in the first place.) But he has a good point. Macs are not the wastes of money they used to be. Period.
BTW, steve666, how exactly do you consider targeting old, aging computers with a bleeding edge OS good business practice? How is it the wrong attitude? How is it foolish? How is costly development for legacy systems going to pay for itself without new hardware sales? How is catering to you, the I-don't-want-to-buy-a-better-computer folk, going to gain them marketshare? You are already stading in their small percentage...
I am sorry.
Didn't mean this as a flame, but seriously, WTF?