Which Quartz effects do you not see on your Pismo?
Quartz Extreme effects are not supported at all on a Pismo because while it has AGP it does not have the minimum required VRAM.
An example would be the animation for fast user switching in 10.3. If you have seen the demos Jobs did or the videos on Apple's site you see that there is a 3D animation when you do a fast user switch. This animation is not available on systems that do not support Quartz Extreme.
I don't see huge effects/performance differences between newer Macs with AGP Radeon 9x00s, etc., and even a Beige G3 with a PCI Rage128 card. The Beige is slower thanks to it's slower CPU speed and in a smaller amount due to it's slower video card.
As a Mac user who has a wide variety of systems to compare [8600/200, Beige G3 300 w/ no video upgrade, Beige G3 400 w/ Rage128 PCI, Blue and White G3 400 w/ Rage 128 PCI, Pismo 400, TiBook G4 400, Power Mac G4 733 w/ GeForce3] I can tell you that video makes a huge difference and much of what you attribute to the processor is not the processor, especially with newer systems.
Try to do some things that older chipsets can't do and you will see a huge difference, the older chipsets simply won't do them.
A G4 processor makes a large difference, but putting a PCI Rage128 card into a Beige G3 does almost as much to increase performance. On systems supporting Quartz Extreme the increase is even greater because it allows graphics to be outsourced from the CPU almost entirely to the GPU.
I see a similar UI video speed increase when upgrading from Beige G3 Rev. A motherboard video (completely unsupported in X) to a PCI Rage128 card in that Beige as when I compare that same Beige/Rage128 video speed to a new Dual G4 1GHz.
This is not accurate. Mac OS X does support the motherboard video chipset [RagePro, RageII, RageIIc, RageII+ DVD, RageII Mobility, RagePro Mobility] on Beige G3s, iBooks, iMacs, Wallstreets, and Lombards. It is the extent of support that people argue over. 2D acceleration is supported and with 10.1.5 and later some 3D support is supported. Quartz [2D] does support and use those chipsets, Quartz Extreme [3D, added with 10.2] does not support PCI video of any kind without 3rd party hacks.
Also your statement is misleading. There is a HUGE jump from the onboard video on a Beige G3 to a fully supported [excluding Quartz Extreme support] card such as a Rage128 PCI. To say that you notice the same level of performance increase from a Beige G3 with a Rage128 PCI to a Dual 1GHz G4 denotes that you see a likewise larger increase in performance.
However, I would make the following qualification. If you don't tax the video, you won't see any difference. My Beige G3 400 with a Rage128 PCI handles windowing and such OK, very useable. Not at all as smooth as my G4 733 with a GeForce3 AGP. However, they are comparable in something like windowing and general GUI use, there is a very noticeable change in performance but its not world changing.
Now tax the video. Play large QuickTime videos while showing iTunes visualizations [no music as music uses the CPU and we only want to test video as much as possible] behind a transparent terminal and move around some Finder windows.
You will find the Beige G3 with PCI Rage128 graphics nearly unusable, it simply can't render fast enough. The Quartz [2D] rendering API is doing all of the composition of the various images but the Rage128 card 1st can't take all the load because the Quartz [2D] API does not dump all of it to the GPU [Rage128 in this case] and 2nd because the Rage128 can't handle it all.
Throughput is also a major difference. AGP gives many times the throughput of PCI, it also deals with data in a much more efficient fashion allowing for greater performance.
Both speed differences are quite noticeable yet people seem to discount the *hardware acceleration* of the PCI Rage128.
This is true, its my opinion it stems from being stuck with ATi as a sole supplier and the Rage128 as the sole video card option for several years without hope of improvement.
Install a Voodoo3 2000 PCI with 16 MB RAM (similar specs/performance all around as the Rage128) yet it is much slower in OS X because it has no OS X hardware drivers so it is much slower than the Rage128.
This is also true. However, people do not generally understand what "supported" means in various contexts. Is the 3dfx card supported? No, but it does work as it does render video. Is a Rage128 PCI card supported? Harder question as it is supported in some instances and not others, same is the case with RagePro and RageII chipsets.
No, the Rage128 doesn't have Quartz Extreme acceleration but it is still accelerated for OS X and apparently will continue to be until support is specifically dropped for the DA G4's which shipped with them.
Or even later. IXMicro cards are still supported for 2D acceleration.
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