At 5:47 AM -0600 2/27/00, Dave wrote:
>Others have guessed that the reason that Apple is only supporting OS X on
>natural-born G3's is not because of CPU speed, but because of the graphics
>performance. You see, OS 6 through 9 draw your desktop and everything you see
>on it with bitmaps of fonts, windows, etc. It is all managed by the CPU.
>With OS X, everything is drawn with vector graphics,
Sorry, that is just not true.
First, MacOS 7, 8, and 9 do accelerate GUI operations with the
graphics card. Try booting a PowerMac G3 with the shift key held
down to disable all extensions (or just selectively disable the ATI
related extensions using Extensions Manager). Without the ATI
graphics acceleration extension (or whatever extension it is for the
card in question) loaded, GUI responsiveness is pretty bad.
Second, OS X does not draw everything with vector graphics. I would
be surprised if most of it wasn't done with bitmaps. Vector drawing
would be very inappropriate for all the gradient and translucent
effects in the Aqua GUI (very hard to draw one of those
blob-of-gelatin buttons using vectors).
> which means that the
>graphics card does the heavy lifting, leaving the CPU free for other
>operations. (This explains why even the iBook packs a hefty ATI graphics
>card in it, even though it is supposed to be the low end of their line.)
No, what explains that is that it's cheap to put in. Also, I would
hesitate to call the iBook's accelerator a "hefty" one -- ATI's chips
are not the fastest in the world right now, and the one they used in
the iBook is their really cheap bottom of the line one. It's good
compared to the "NeoMagic" (aka NeoTragic) chips seen in most PC
notebooks, but is quite slow compared to the Rage 128 seen in Apple's
other products.
>I have heard of some people getting OS X to run on 7500's with G3's and
>upgraded graphics, but I would be very surprised is a 2400 could manage it.
I have run OS X Server on my G3 upgraded 2400. Not the fastest thing
in the world, but not unbearable either. OS X needs a lot of RAM to
run well, so it's good to have it maxxed out at 80 or 112.
Tim Seufert
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