Quartz Extreme enhancements?
Can you get any more exxxtreme? 
Quartz Extreme was first shown at WWDC last year, using the GPU of current video cards to accelerate various tasks with relation to quartz blah blah.
Now that a year has nearly elapsed, do you think apple can do any further work on QE? eg accelerate 2D with QE? (vs compositing like now). Will pixel shaders be used to do anything useful, as most modern graphics cards support pixel shaders.
Frankly if 10.3 delivers two things, I will be happy: a new file system (with that guy they brought over from BeOS - a file system with lots of yummy features), and enhanced performance. If pixel/vertex shaders can aid QE any more, then I hope this comes soon!
Quartz Extreme was first shown at WWDC last year, using the GPU of current video cards to accelerate various tasks with relation to quartz blah blah.
Now that a year has nearly elapsed, do you think apple can do any further work on QE? eg accelerate 2D with QE? (vs compositing like now). Will pixel shaders be used to do anything useful, as most modern graphics cards support pixel shaders.
Frankly if 10.3 delivers two things, I will be happy: a new file system (with that guy they brought over from BeOS - a file system with lots of yummy features), and enhanced performance. If pixel/vertex shaders can aid QE any more, then I hope this comes soon!
Comments
I was trying to work out why guys with the same processor as me, much the same hard drives and, in a couple of cases, less physical RAM were getting XBench results 10 points higher.
Scroll down to the Graphics tests, and there is a good 20-25 point difference, which I can only put down to the fact that these guys seem to have non-QE graphics cards (a Rage Pro 128 in particular stuck out in my mind).
My guess is that all the GUI stuff being pumped through the card is using cycles that could otherwise be used for pure graphics performance (OpenGL in particular seemed to suffer).
Still, my Macs don't get used for games, so I'd rather let the processor have those cycles.
Hardware accelerated scrolling! It would require prodigious amounts of RAM for both your cpu and video card. Perhaps a smart caching algorithm could be used to only cache scroll regions in the window with focus.
The word Snappy™ would begin to seem like those Color TV signs out front of old hotels.
[ 02-26-2003: Message edited by: dfiler ]</p>
<strong>My vote for most desirable enhancement of quartz extreme:
Hardware accelerated scrolling! It would require prodigious amounts of RAM for both your cpu and video card. Perhaps a smart caching algorithm could be used to only cache scroll regions in the window with focus.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Scrolling is already hardware accelerated in Mac OS X 10.2. It was a new feature.
We're getting really close to the point where Apple will be able to do that. Imagine the one-two of a UI that requires nothing of the CPU combined with a CPU (the 970) that is several times more powerful!
<strong>
Scrolling is already hardware accelerated in Mac OS X 10.2. It was a new feature.</strong><hr></blockquote>Really? (actually curious)
My tests with quartz debug seemed to suggest otherwise. Is there any documentation on this?