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.
Aha. I don't have the Panther beta.
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.
I used the wrong wording there, "unsupported" should be "unaccelerated"- this is a Beige Rev A with the Rage II MBoard video which doesn't have any HW acceleration in OS X as far as I've found in Apple Docs about OS X.
What you say about the extent of support is right on the mark. I've installed OS X onto a number of minimally accelerated or unaccelerated video Macs and G3 PBooks and have found the 10.1.5 and later video acceleration for RageProLT in the Bronze SCSI 333-400 PBook pretty usable and the iMacs with RagePro (I've only used the 333s so far) also pretty useable. The models before those (Wallstreets, 233 MHz Rev A. iMacs, Rev A Beige G3s) have disappointing UI speed thanks to unaccelerated X video.
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.
I was probably unclear in my comparison but I agree with you completely here. That is what I was trying to say.
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.
I use the UI mainly for the simple tasks you mention and don't overlay windows with iTunes visualizations/QT/transparent Terminal at all which is probably why I am so satisfied with Rage128 performance (and maybe I've lowered my standards as well... ;).
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.
Good point as I have a ixMicro card in a B&W G3 which is running as a 100bT file server and the video works OK, just not accelerated like the PCI Rage128 which it came with (which is now in the Beige).
-- 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:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
