On Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 02:35 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote:

> On 03.07.2002 1:13 Uhr, Darcy James Argue wrote
>
>> I think "nonsense" is perhaps a little strong, Johannes, considering 
>> the
>> gist of my post was right.
>
> Perhaps nonsense is strong (my anger is directed at Apple, not at you), 
> but
> the gist of your post is still not right. Even though there apparently 
> was a
> law suit against Apple, it has not really got anything to do with Rage 
> Pro
> support in 10.1.5,

What?

Here is the story as reported at MacCentral:

"The law firm of King & Ferlauto has filed a class action lawsuit 
against Apple in Superior Court for the State of California for the 
County of Los Angeles. The firm alleges that Apple has violated the 
California Consumer Legal Remedies Act by not supporting certain 
G3-equipped models of Mac systems with the same features in Mac OS X 
afforded to more recently developed G4-based systems. [...]

"The firm alleges that Apple represented in a press release published in 
May of 1998 that Mac OS X would be "fully optimized" for PowerPC 
G3-based systems. More recently, however, G3 users migrating from Mac OS 
9 to Mac OS X have discovered that they've lost features like DVD 
playback, support for hardware graphics acceleration using OpenGL and 
hardware-accelerated QuickTime movie playback.

"Older Power Macs, iBooks, iMacs and PowerBooks sport slower ATI 
graphics accelerators, and to date, Apple has not provided OS X drivers 
or application software that offer the same capabilities as drivers and 
applications under 9."

<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0201/31.g3osx.php>

This lawsuit is clearly the reason Apple introduced Quicktime and 2D 
graphics acceleration for older ATI graphics hardware in OS 10.1.5, 
because before this suit was filed, they had said they had "no plans" to 
do so.

>  nor is there full Rage Pro support. I have a Rage Pro,
> and I am not supported. Not at all.

[snip]

> No it isn't. I have a Rage Pro in my Wallstreet, and nothing is 
> accelerated.
> OS X runs like a dead elefant on my Wallstreet, even though my machine 
> is
> officially fully supported by OS X.
> It is not just Games or things like that, there is effectively no 
> hardware
> acceleration.

[snip]

> And that is just not the whole truth, and no better than "full support" 
> was
> before. I jumped to the ceiling when I read this, only to realize that 
> once
> again my machine was left out.

Johannes, I've seen the benchmarks from people comparing the results 
(QuickTime playback, window scrolling, etc) in OS X 10.1.4 vs 10.1.5 and 
I can assure you that Apple *did* introduce hardware acceleration for 
the ATI Rage Pro in 10.1.5, just like it says in the ReadMe file.  This 
fixed the problem for beige G3 owners, bondi iMac owners, and Lombard 
PowerBook owners (i.e., the vast majority of users who were having the 
problem). However, your machine (the WallStreet Powerbook) is among the 
very oldest models that is still capable of running OS X at all, and the 
graphics card used in this machine is not the Rage Pro but the "Rage Pro 
LT" (not the same thing), which has a different chipset and only 4MB of 
RAM.  Unfortunately this card is not (yet?) supported in OS X.  Details 
can be found in the link below -- scroll down to read WallStreet owner 
reports:

<http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/osx_ragepro_driver_tip.html>

You might not be entirely S.O.L., though, Johannes.  Apple went from 
"We're not going to fix this problem at all" to "Okay, here's our 
attempt at a fix" in just a few short months.  (Yes, it took a lawsuit 
for them to change their minds, but such is often the case.)  Since 
they've already written the Rage Pro driver, it's certainly possible 
that the Rage Pro LT will be supported in the next update to OS X.

> If you compare the performace of OS 9 and OS X on my machine you'll know
> what I mean. This is not about Games, it is about using the computer. I
> still have some hopes that this will be better with 10.2, but currently 
> OS X
> is simply not usable on my machine, as there is no hardware 
> acceleration. I
> don't need 3D, but I want to be able to resize a window.

While I understand and sympathize with your frustration, Johannes, we 
are talking here about a notebook computer that was introduced over four 
years ago.  The Lombard is the oldest model of PowerBook that is capable 
of running OS X at all.  Even if video acceleration for the Rage Pro LT 
is introduced in 10.2, don't expect miracles.  OS X is very demanding 
and it will never be as responsive as OS 9 when it comes to things like 
window resizing (for obvious reasons -- windows in OS 9 do not 
dynamically resize, nor do they cast drop shadows), *especially* on old 
hardware.  I think you have unreasonable expectations about how well OS 
X can perform on your machine.  I mean, try installing Windows XP on a 
four-year old IBM ThinkPad and see how well *that* setup performs.

- Darcy

-----
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Boston MA

_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Reply via email to