After running Panther on my work test mac I bit the bullet and put it
on my G4 PowerBook....
first the negative stuff... non apple screen savers "hang the system"
bugger no big surprise and no great loss but had me doing the old 3
button salute within 15 minutes if the install :(
now for the good:
OK everybody knows exposé and yep it's great, behind the scenes
networking improvements are a major plus particularly with in the UWA
environment.
but has anybody noted the massive boost in GL (graphics) performance
particularly on the powerbooks?
My sandbox test mac doesn't have a card that supports openGL so this
was lost on it in the last week of testing but within seconds of
using panther on my PowerBook I notice that the windows
opening/closing scrolling where all factorially faster, yes as in
multiples of times faster.
Arcing up Unreal Tournamen, without touching the settings, was a
revelation despite all settings been set to the absolute minimum (as
required by Jaguar to get at least some smoothness of game play) the
increase in graphics quality and speed were significant as was the
improvement in smoothness of game play and an increase in frames per
second (by about 25%). I decided to kill Unreal by setting all
graphics options to the absolute max:
32 bit colour depth V's 16bit
1024x768 resolution v's 800x600
Texture, world, character and physics details maxed out v's minimum settings
all options set to "ON" ( shadows/dynamic lighting/trilinear
filtering, coronas etc) V's all set to "OFF"
Even still it now outperforms (graphics & FPS wise if not game choice
wise) my purpose built (if 3 year old) G-Force 3 Gaming PC
--
~
Mark Secker [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ph#9380 1855 (ECEL)
ECEL Computer Support Officer, University of Western Australia.
CRICOS Provider No. 00126G
~
"present day
present time "
