>From what I understand, it goes like this: Quartz Extreme was Apple's first layer of hardware video acceleration. It requires a minimum of a GeForce 2 or a Radeon graphics card on an AGP bus to function. Quartz Extreme was designed to speed up finder graphics and 2D animation by offloading graphics rendering to the graphics card instead of using the CPU for rendering as had been done in the past. Without a Quartz Extreme video card, Tiger and later operating systems are fairly sluggish since the CPU is required to render all graphics and animations that your screen displays.
Core Image takes Quartz Extreme to the next level. It required a GeForce 5200 or a Radeon 9600 graphics card minimum to function. Core Image accelerates all graphics rendering on the system as well as allowing 3rd party applications to use the graphics card for proprietary functions. 2 examples I can think of right off the top of my head are Flash and Photoshop. Flash applets, such as YouTube will benefit SIGNIFICANTLY from Core Image. I can use my Quicksilver G4 as an example. With it's stock GeForce 4 graphics card on Leopard, only Quartz Extreme is supported. Watching a YouTube movie is similar to watching a slide show. The whole computer grinds to a halt. I upgraded it a while back to run a flashed GeForce 6200 graphics card which supports Core Image. The XBench graphics benchmark score actually went DOWN, but Flash apps like YouTube run smooth as glass. The Finder overall feels much more responsive as well. If you can manage it, upgrading to a Core Image capable card makes a major difference in how your Mac behaves. For further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Extreme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image On Jul 5, 2010, at 7:27 PM, Mark Sokolovsky wrote: > Core image is the very center of the graphics on Mac OS X. If the video card > doesn't support it, well then, I guess you can kiss fast graphics goodbye. As > for quartz extreme, i don't know too much about it, but I know for a fact > that any video card that doesn't support it will make the graphics even on > Mac OS X 10.4.11 or earlier really slow. > > -- > Sent from my Power mac G4 Sawtooth. > > -- > You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for > those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power > Macs. > The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette > guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
