> Even on the normally sprightly PCIRage128 in the Beige G3/500, it's choppy compared to by AGP Rage128 in my G4/450DP (nice and smooth).
Bus bandwidth. The PCI bus *theoretical* max is that same 133 MB/s as uncached 60ns RAM in the PM7500 (33 MHz * 32 bits / 8 bits/byte). AGP is 533 MB/s even for 1X.
Plus, with Quartz Extreme the GPU can do the translucent compositing and it's probably got GB/s of bandwidth to its RAM.
Again, I don't know how to test that aside from the full screen menu fading I mentioned above. What operations aside from menu drawing use this consistently? I'd like to test it in a number of machines I have access to.
Title bars, translucent windows (I use translucent Terminals all the time so I can see what's going on in other apps without losing any screen space), drop shadows on windows (that's why Shadowkiller speeds things up) the Dock, ...
Okeydokey I just did an install of OS 10.2.6 onto a 7500 G3/420 (fastest thing I could do) and tested dragging a 50% transparent terminal window on the 4MB MBoard video and PCI Rage128 video at Thousands and Millions (1024x768).
MBoard video at Millions is slowest, MBoard video at Thousands and Rage128 at Millions is about the same, noticeably faster. Rage128 at Thousands is a bit faster than those but the differences in speed aren't huge; it's choppy with all these.
Relative speeds are similar to the Beige G3/500 sitting next to it with the Beige being just a bit faster, with just a bit less lag. The B&W G3/450 I set up recently is another notch up the continuum (with it's Rage128) but it is not a quantum leap in performance.
These differences in speed on the 7500 are not nearly as dramatic as the speedup in Dock magnification with the Rage128- it's almost smooth at Thousands or Millions but is way choppy with the MBoard video at either resolution. All other aspects of video (scrolling, moving opaque windows around) are much faster with the Rage128. I see no reason not to use supported PCI video (Rage128, Radeons) in OS X other than lack of availability or price.
- Tom
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