> 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.
Apple lists the 7500 as having a 64 bit data path with a 50 MHz bus speed, giving a theoretical data throughput of 50 MHz * 64 bits � 8bits/byte = 400 MB/sec. So by your reckoning, the RAM in these PCI Macs was 1/3 the speed that the bus could have achieved, even with the DIMMs interleaved? That's rather disappointing, but enlightening for me. I always wondered why the numbers were so much lower than the theoretical 400 MB/sec.
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, ...
I tested the dragging the Terminal around at 50% transparency on the Beige G3/500 (I don't have access to the 7500 running X yet) with the Beige's MBoard video and the PCI Rage128 card at Thousands and Millions of colors. The Rage128 at both Thousands and Millions and the MBoard at Thousands updated pretty choppily but at about the same rate. The MBoard video at Millions was noticeably slower (choppier). But as you mentioned, the MBoard video in the Beige G3 is PCI (unlike the 7300-9600) and doesn't have the limitations of the 7x00's PCI bus. Same transparent Terminal drag was smooth on the AGP Rage128 G4/450 at both color depths. I'm working on getting access to the 7600...
- Tom
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