> Is anyone out there running Jaguar on an IDE drive, connected to a PCI > IDE drive controller - and also enabled Quartz Extreme on their PCI > graphics card?
I have Quartz Extreme enabled on my 9600/300. I do not have any IDE devices (my last Acard 6280M died) and have decided to go all SCSI for stability reasons. My system: XLR8 G4/450 Radeon Mac Edition 32MB DDR Adaptec 29160N Ultra 160 controller FiWi/USB2 combo Cheetah 15k HD et al > I wondered if Quartz Extreme would speed thing up in the GUI, but then > slow down the other PCI slots. Thereby eliminating the speed > advantages > of using an IDE drive (on something like an UltraTek ULTRA-66 or a > Sonnet TEMPO ATA-100) over the slower SCSI bus. > > Anyone have any feedback? A 33MHz/32-bit PCI bus can sustain 132 MB/sec throughput. Most 7200RPM IDE drives will put out between 20-40MB/sec in read/write access. The onboard SCSI interface will run 5-10MB/sec. That leaves the rest of the bandwith to video and some networking/input devices. People have really been concerned about QE saturating the PCI bus. The way I see it, to max out your PCI bus, you would have to be doing some pretty serious work: i.e. video editing, game playing, iTunes visualizing, large file copying, or a combination of these and other factors. Most people don't use their upgraded old machines for such work. And if they do, it's usually not the primary focus of the machine. Everyday use will not even come close to saturating the PCI bus. Also, QE only offloads GL work to the GPU. So even if you were to peak out, it would only be in times where heavy GL work was being done in conjunction with other intensive tasks. With the various benchmarks I've run, CPU GL crunching wins over PCI-GPU crunching-- but not by much. The application benchmarks I ran were not specific to testing the GL compositing, but had some other visual tests that usually came up with some "arbitrary" overall numbers or times. I took it upon myself when this whole QE/PCI craze hit, to really see if I needed it or not. After all, it was speculated that these cards would work if enabled, and I did pay $200+ for my Radeon. My gauge of real-world performance benefits focused on heavy GL tasks that would really stress the CPU offloading that QE is supposed to provide. The best ideas were finder window actions like minimizing, resizing, and moving. To take these to the extreme, I placed transparent terminal window(s) over various GL-heavy tasks (flurry as background, itunes visualizer, playing QT movies) and did the above-mentioned tasks while looking at window manager's %CPU through top in the terminal. The results were amazing. Many of the above mentioned tasks immobilized the finder without QE. top showed an instant 100% CPU hit to window manager. Disk access ground to a halt. With QE enabled, window manager never exceeded ~30% and the system remained totally responsive, as if nothing was going on. All effects for me on a daily basis are always much snappier then when QE is disabled, while freeing up more CPU for other tasks. I would say for me, an overall 5% performance advantage overall, and with heavy GL tasks a 75% advantage. I would highly recommend enabling it if it is possible for you. Even with more than one IDE drive you should see positive results. YMMV, of course :) -Charles -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:UnsupportedOSX@;mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:UnsupportedOSX-off@;mail.maclaunch.com> For digest mode, email: <mailto:UnsupportedOSX-digest@;mail.maclaunch.com> Subscription questions: <mailto:listmom@;lemlists.com> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
