Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 4:26 pm Post subject: The Point of Tiger?
I am deeply wondering whether or not Tiger is going to be of any help for me. I read review and while I found it interesting, I couldn't make out if any of the CoreImage and Quartz improvement will work on my system.
You see, I (and all of the iBook, old iMac and Mac Mini users with me) have a Radeon 9200 video card which does not seem to have a programmable interface. They said 9600 or better. So I would be losing out on a fat share of the speed improvements.
The snag is that the review only points to a Radeon 9600 or better in one place. In other places, talk is of ' reasonably modern'.
Does anyone here have experience with Tiger on the low end systems and can give me an indication of what actually will speed up?
Thanks in advance. And yes, I will understand if this info I requested is not really forthcoming until *after* Tiger is released..
Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 6:28 pm Post subject: Re: The Point of Tiger?
I read somewhere, and I wish I could remember where it was, that the greatest performance improvements were detected on lower-end systems... Maybe it's just because the faster machines are lightning quick anyway, so a speedup is less likely to be noticable...
Still, fwiw I'm gonna wait and get Tiger with a new laptop, whenever THOSE are announced...
W
ovvldc wrote:
I am deeply wondering whether or not Tiger is going to be of any help for me. I read review and while I found it interesting, I couldn't make out if any of the CoreImage and Quartz improvement will work on my system.
You see, I (and all of the iBook, old iMac and Mac Mini users with me) have a Radeon 9200 video card which does not seem to have a programmable interface. They said 9600 or better. So I would be losing out on a fat share of the speed improvements.
The snag is that the review only points to a Radeon 9600 or better in one place. In other places, talk is of ' reasonably modern'.
Does anyone here have experience with Tiger on the low end systems and can give me an indication of what actually will speed up?
Thanks in advance. And yes, I will understand if this info I requested is not really forthcoming until *after* Tiger is released..
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 10:08 pm Post subject:
What excites me about 10.4 is the sheer infrastructure that it provides for developing some truly amazing applications. In terms of the user experience out of the box, I don't personally think 10.4 is going to be that revolutionary. Operating system upgrades are more "evolutionary".
What will be revolutionary are the technologies that will start arriving within the next year or two that leverage some of the amazing toolboxes 10.4 provides to programmers. Imagine being able to have nice Core Image/Video transitions in Impress, for example. No way could I program great fades and transitions, and neither would I want to even though I think the ones in Impress suck hole. But now that there are a whole bunch of quality filters and transitions...
And that's just a small thing, too. I'm sure folks will think of lots more. 10.4 is really one of the first OS updates in a long time that developers get so much more than the end user...at least for now...
check out this discussion about performance here from arstechnica.
Thanks, but that was exactly the review why I started this topic. That page in particular mentions it is faster, but also keep linking it to the GPU. And I don't seem to have a GPU that will play ball.
BTW, I checked and the reviewer has used only systems with a Radeon 9600 or higher (including that Powerbook)... _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Thanks, but that was exactly the review why I started this topic. )
Doh! You're right. Didn't see that link in there...
ovvldc wrote:
That page in particular mentions it is faster, but also keep linking it to the GPU. And I don't seem to have a GPU that will play ball.
Well it does say:
Quote:
It would be easy to attribute all of these improvements to Quartz 2D Extreme. It'd also be wrong. Disabling Quartz 2D Extreme (using the Quartz Debug application that's part of the free developers tools bundled with Tiger) has little perceptible effect on window resizing, in particular, for most applications. What this means is that not all UI performance is gated by drawing speed.
It appears that window resizing is much more likely to be held back by the CPU overhead of iteratively reflowing/refreshing UI elements—especially nested elements—within the window than by the time required to do the actual drawing.
In fact, he also points out, after a lengthy technical descussion about Quartz 2d Extreme, that Quartz 2d Extreme is *disabled* in Tiger by default... at least in 1.4 (speculating that 1.4.1 may turn it on). So any speedups reported by users in the next few days is unlikely to be due to the gpu.
And I KNOW I read somewhere that someone installed it on a g3 mac and said that the greatest perception of increased UI performance was on lower end (ie, g3) machines, followed by g4 and then g5.. Maybe I read this on one of the macnn forums.. i wish I had the link...
And I KNOW I read somewhere that someone installed it on a g3 mac and said that the greatest perception of increased UI performance was on lower end (ie, g3) machines, followed by g4 and then g5.. Maybe I read this on one of the macnn forums.. i wish I had the link...
That's nice to hear. I guess I'll have to put ia Tiger on my budget then .
Thanks, Waldo. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Somewhere else in the review (sorry, I wasn't paying that much attention, but thanks for the link!), he also notes all of the optimizations done on the software side of things. Whereas QuickDraw used to be 2x as fast as (non-GPU accelerated) Quartz/CoreGraphics, non-GPU Q/CG is now 5x or something faster than QuickDraw....
Overall, that article made me feel a bit better about 10.4 (a couple of places worse; I'd rant, but it's pointless)....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Whereas QuickDraw used to be 2x as fast as (non-GPU accelerated) Quartz/CoreGraphics, non-GPU Q/CG is now 5x or something faster than QuickDraw....
Which reminds me, when I was reading that I wondered: what does Neo/J use? _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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