Apple's efforts to speed up Quartz?

M

MacFury

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Quartz currently uses a heavy ammount of CPU cycles. Does anyone know what Apple is planning on doing to offload some of this rendering to graphics cards such as the Radeon and Geoforce? I'm assuming they are doing something since taking 15% of a G4's cycles just to display the GUI is hardly an advancement.


-MacFury
 
For what it is and how it works Quartz is a remarkable piece of programming. Currently however, their are no sufficient drivers or hardware to adequately allow the GPU to tak over the GUI control any more effectively than the CPU does now.

The poblem in this case is that in being forward thinking Apple out[aced hardware. new drivers are expected and there's a lot more performance to be wrung out of the graphics layer itself, but, the serious speed bumps will come with new Graphics cards, or perhaps, as has been limitedly speculated, a daughter card to handle the 2D rendering.

There are extensive discussion about Quartz optimization all over these fora andover at MacNN. Do a search, you'll get more information than you care to know!

Ciao!
 
I disagree in regards to Apple not being able to increase the speed of the GUI using the Graphics card. Take a look at the Enlightenment window manager for XFree86. It uses the graphics card ( I cannot recall if the window manager handles 3D or 2D?), to display an incredible GUI at speeds comprible to less graphic intense window managers. If apple tried, I imagine they could squeeze a lot of speed out of that unharnessed power.

BTW, i am talking about Enlightenment 0.17, which is available through CVS.
 
Originally posted by jdog
I disagree in regards to Apple not being able to increase the speed of the GUI using the Graphics card. Take a look at the Enlightenment window manager for XFree86.
Click to expand...
Quartz is a totally different GUI that basically uses PDF for display.
This can not be accelerated through any of todays graphic cards.
There is a posting of one of the former 3dfx programmers (Ken Dyke I think) about this topic, who explains it very well.
 
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