On Tuesday, July 2, 2002, at 12:14 PM, Philip Aker wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 2, 2002, at 01:42 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > >>> OTOH, Apple has been very good about accommodating older CDRW drives >>> (albeit slow). > >> Yes, but as far as the Powerbook G3 series goes, they sold OS X as >> being fully compatible with these, but didn't tell us that the >> Graphics ship was unsupported, resulting in very slow performance, no >> Open GL etc. We'll see what the 10.2 update brings, but I don't have >> much hope. > > I have read some of the Jaguar details. You will have to have some > minimum card (nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or > GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card. 32MB VRAM recommended for optimum > performance) to take advantage of the Quartz graphics but I don't know > if it is possible to upgrade your machine to one of them. Philip, You are confusing two different issues. The original issue of OS X did not support Quartz graphic acceleration for *any* video card, but it did support hardware-accelerated QuickTime playback and OpenGL for most video cards. However, there were some ostensibly "OS X-supported" machines, such as the beige G3's, the original iMac, and some PowerBook G3's, which were outfitted with very old video cards (ATI Rage II, ATI Rage Pro), and QuickTime and OpenGL acceleration was not enabled under OS X on these machines. Subsequently, some of the owners of these machines banded together and sued Apple for false advertising, and to avoid the lawsuit, Apple moved quickly to introduce support for these video cards. (They have been supported since OS 10.1.4, I believe). What you are talking about is "Quartz Extreme," which is about accelerating the actual GUI of OS X. I should add that it is not possible to upgrade the video card in a notebook computer or iMac, nor is it possible to add an AGP slot to the motherboard of a G3 or first-generation G4, so only the users of the very latest hardware will be able to benefit from Quartz Extreme. However, there is nothing sinister going on here -- it's simply that video cards with less than 32 MB of RAM typically cannot process Quartz graphics more quickly than the CPU, and the higher bandwidth of AGP slots (vs. PCI) is also required to make this feasible. Apple could enable Quartz Extreme on lower-end computers, but the result would be that they would run the GUI *slower*, not faster. - Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Boston MA _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
