> There is no magic other sort of Quartz Extreme which is only available
> for people with extra large video RAM. There's only Quartz Extreme.
> 16MB. A supported GPU. That's it. Fully supported.
Well, more RAM will allows them to keep more textures (windows) in
the GPU-addressible memory, which will have an impact on performance.
Not functionality, no, but definitely performance.
Basic description:
Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window
into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on
screen. The graphics processor focuses on what it does best.
graphics. freeing the PowerPC chip to do more operations in the
same amount of time. Drawing windows, resizing, moving, scrolling,
everything is zippier. And Panther even improves upon the considerable
speed gains in Mac OS X.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/
More detail:
For maximum performance, the textures (window buffers) being
composited should be in video memory. But they must also remain in
main memory, because they can be evicted from the limited pool of
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
video memory at any time.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Without QE, data flows from the window buffers in main memory to
the CPU for compositing. With QE, data flows from main memory to
the video card instead. This removes the burden on the bus between
main memory and the CPU. But if all of the window buffers in main
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
memory cannot fit into video memory, there will be heavy demands
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
placed on the bus between main memory and the video card.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So it's no surprise that two of the requirements for Quartz Extreme
support are at least 16MB of VRAM (32MB recommended) and an AGP2x
bus (4x or better recommended). Furthermore, since windows come in
many different shapes and sizes, video cards that do not support
arbitrary texture sizes (e.g. ATI Rage 128) cannot use Quartz
Extreme. The video card must also have support for all the pixel
formats used by Quartz, and support multitexturing.
Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window
into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on
screen. The graphics processor focuses on what it does best,
graphics, freeing the PowerPC chip to do more operations in the
same amount of time. Drawing windows, resizing, moving, scrolling,
everything is zippier. And Panther even improves upon the considerable
speed gains in Mac OS X.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/
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