On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 03:11 PM, Andrew Levin wrote:
Darcy,Everything else being equal, a faster processor will definitely make much more of a difference than a faster video card. In OS X, if you have less than 256 MB of physical RAM, you probably want to get yourself at least up to that level to minimize virtual memory use.
I have 384 MB at school and 512 at work.
That should be sufficient.
This is the Rage 128 Pro, which is not the same thing as the Rage Pro. The Rage Pro was used in the beige G3s and pre-Firewire PowerBooks. As for the slots, the AGP slot, introduced with the 2nd generation G4 towers, has greater bandwidth than the PCI slot and is thus capable of greater performance.But I'm confused about your statement that these G4s have a Rage Pro, since the G4s always shipped with a Rage 128, at minimum -- unless of course they aren't "real" G4s, but beige machines that have had their processors upgraded.It's a real G4. Perhaps I listed it wrong. According to Apple System Profiler, the "Card name" is "ATY, Rage128Pd" and the "Card Model" is "ATY, Rage 128Pro." It's in the AGP slot. It's all greek to me.
They are two completely different cards. The 7000 goes in the PCI slot and is designed for people wanting to add a little juice to older Macs -- it's not that fast because it doesn't have to be, since the PCI bus itself is such a bottleneck. The 9000 goes in the AGP slot -- it's a fully modern video card capable of supporting Quartz Extreme and is standard on the latest Macs. Since you have an AGP slot in your G4, you definitely don't want a PCI card.If that's the case I would recommend putting a Radeon 7000 PCI in both machines. OS X support for the Rage Pro is dodgy at best, and 2D acceleration is often not supported. If you are mistaken about the type of video card you have -- if you have a real G4 with a Rage 128 or better -- than you won't see much improvement in 2D performance between the Rage 128 and the Radeon 7000, although the image quality is much better, IMO. (The main reason to get one of these cards is 3D performance -- the Radeon 7000 is over three times faster than the Rage 128.) Finally, if you have a real G4 with an AGP slot for the graphics card (the AGP slot was introduced with the second generation of G4s) and your current video card has less than 32 MB of VRAM, you should *definitely* upgrade to a Radeon 9000 AGP so you can take advantage of Quartz Extreme.I can't answer the above because I don't really know what I have. The 9000 costs twice that of the 7000; there's that much difference?
I don't need second monitor support, and I don't do a thing with 3D. What I want is faster redraws (in Finale and in photo editing software).In your case, you will not get faster redraws in Finale by upgrading the video card. You will only get that by upgrading your processor or getting a new Mac.
Also, is Quartz Extreme that incredible? Going from OS 9 to Quartz in OS X was very nice; Q Extreme is yet another jump in beauty and readability?Quartz Extreme *looks* exactly the same as Quartz -- it's just hardware accelerated. What this effectively means is that much of the OS X eye candy (such as transparency) is handled by the video card instead of the CPU, which makes all sorts of interface elements in OS X (menus, etc) respond much more quickly. Your windows are also cached on the CPU, so switching between various windows or dragging them around is much faster. Alpha-channel transparency in photo editing apps may or may not benefit from Quartz Extreme, I'm not sure.
In order to enable Quartz Extreme you need an AGP video card with a minimum 32 MB of VRAM -- and your Rage 128 doesn't fit the bill. Currently, there are only two AGP cards for Mac on the market, the Radeon 8500 and the Radeon 9000. (Paradoxically, the Radeon 8500 is slightly more expensive.) If you're looking for a deal, you could scour eBay for someone selling an OEM nVidia GeForce 4 MX -- you can't buy them at MacMall or wherever because the Mac-compatible versions of these cards are not sold at retail, they are only included with new Macs. But people sometimes sell them when they upgrade their video card. Be careful, though, as the PC version of this card will *not* work, you need to find someone who got this card by buying a Mac.
My advice: if your primary OS is OS X, for god's sake spend the $169 and get the Radeon 9000 so you can take advantage of Quartz Extreme. No, it won't help redraws in Finale, but it will make the entire operating system respond better -- menus will drop down more quickly, switching between windows (in any application) will be faster, dragging windows around will be seamless.... Since all you need to do in order to get Quartz Extreme going on your machine is add a better video card, you'd be nuts not to do so -- IMO.
Thanks for your response, and sorry to the list for this personal help session; I tried emailing Darcy directly and it came back to me because my message was perceived as spam. (??)Whoa -- I guess the mac.com servers are getting aggressive about blacklisting ISPs.
Oh, one more question -- what kind of monitor do you have and what connection are you using? VGA, DVI, or ADC?
- Darcy
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Boston MA
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