... From John Siracusa over at Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
Most interesting wrinkle so far: Quartz 2D is now part of Quartz Extreme as well. This means that the ordinary 2D display API is now hardware-accelerated; previously, 2D image display was done in software on the CPU and then the results transferred to the GPU for compositing. That means lots of big flat textures being transferred from main RAM to graphics card RAM, which is why Quartz Extreme required AGP and the hack to enable it on PCI systems both didn't give such good performance and flooded the PCI bus. Now, only the relatively small 2D drawing instructions go over the main system bus to the graphics card, not whole windows. This potentially could make a really big difference to older, slower, CPU-bound Macs with slower PCI buses and no AGP. If Ryan gets XPostFacto supporting Tiger, which I'm sure he will before too long, and then someone can find out how to enable Quartz Extreme on older PCI-only machines, then potentially, owners of Radeon Mac or 7000 or 9200 cards will see a /dramatic/ performance improvement. It could make a QE-compatible video card into one of /the/ essential upgrades for people trying to run OS X on unsupported hardware. -- Liam Proven Home: http://welcome.to/liamsweb * Blog: http://lproven.livejournal.com AOL, Yahoo UK: liamproven * ICQ: 73187508 * MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
