Jag and Radeon 8500 and window resize is lousy???!!! Please help!

karavite

karavite

Registered
Okay, please tell me why with my just upgrading to 10.2 and just installing an agp ATI Radeon 8500 (a card that supports QE) this past week:

Mail, finder and IE windows (almost any window) still resizes slowly/jerky!!! I don't see any improvement and am a little peeved, but before I jump to conclusions...

I installed the card earlier this week with 10.1.5 and it worked fine (noticed a big improvement in moving windows). I cannot install or reinstall drivers since ATI's site says 10.2 has 8500 drivers included in 10.2 - is there something I need to adjust/set to use Quartz Extreme?

P.S. I have 1 GB of RAM and a G4 450 and am running two 19" VGA monitors at a recommended/approved resolution of 1152 x 870 at 75 hertz.
 
Im sorry to say that i think jaguar has no acceleration for window resizing. It isn't a graphical function that QE can speed up. The CPU must recalculate all of the relative locations for frames, buttons, and text. Then it renders the window and sends it to the graphics card. Dragging it should be faster because that is offloaded to the GPU because the "image" has already been made by the OS.

I was angry too, but for complex windows like project builder, and entourage.. It's gonna have to be a fact of life.
 
Hi Chrios - thanks for the reply, this makes sense. I haven't had a chance to see 10.2 (or even earlier systems) on anything faster than my machine (I need to get out more!), but are you saying window resizing is a problem (or at least noticiable) on all Macs running Jag or not?

I actually called Apple today (free calls for 90 days with purchase of Jaguar) and they said it is largely a function on the processor too, though I doubt the tech support rep knows as much as you do. I suggested they offer a systems pref option that just draws the outline of a window being resized - you can see the same thing on Office X and on some *nix window managers like WindowMaker that add things like a little more fancy outline displaying the coordinates of the window. Know what I mean? Personally I would be thrilled with this option even if I had a dual processor 1.5 GHZ machine! He said he would enter it as a feature request, but I cannot imagine why they didn't do this from day one - I think it would have helped avoid a lot of the bad press OS X got for clunkiness.

I usually sell my Macs when they are about 1 - 1.5 years old, but I really like my G4 450 and I have held on to it. I cannot believe that when Apple is still selling G3s in iBooks that my computer is somehow too slow. It is fine for everything I do including video editing and I have a hard time justifying it to myself (let alone my wife!) to sell it and buy a new machine so my windows will resize smoother!

Since it sounds like you are a developer, why don't you write a systems pref that allows for outlines of the window during resizing! :) From the little I know about programming and operating systems, it sounds like it might be kind of tricky. Do you think Apple will ever offer such a feature? Until they sell dual processor G4 ibooks, it seems like it would help (for everything except finder windows viewed as columns when you want to change the column width).
 
although this must be a painfully obvious comment, it seems as though quartz is way too far ahead of its time, and poorly concieved in this respect as far as hardware/cpu requirements....and the inability to be fully accelerated or at least perform adequately by many person's standards.

reading the ars technica article really opens your eyes to how advanced quartz is...and just how much calculation goes into something as "simple" as window drawing.

I also agree that it is probably a fact of life that OS X graphically will always seem slow or slower than it should be until the hotter hardware comes a year or two from now.
 
Im sorry to say it would affect all macs. I would venture that even the dual 1.25 Ghz would have problem with it. These increasingly complex windows with all their aqua glitz sucks up CPU power like none other. I also agree that their should be an option to just use a grey outline like OS9. But much of these preferences are hardcoded into quartz's window drawing routines for OSX. Developers can tailor their applications (like MS Word and others) to use outlines. Im still a novice at all the OSX preferences and APIs. Perhaps you should email the people who make applications like tinker tool.
 
I suggested they offer a systems pref option that just draws the outline of a window being resized - you can see the same thing on Office X and on some *nix window managers like WindowMaker that add things like a little more fancy outline displaying the coordinates of the window. Know what I mean? Personally I would be thrilled with this option even if I had a dual processor 1.5 GHZ machine! He said he would enter it as a feature request, but I cannot imagine why they didn't do this from day one - I think it would have helped avoid a lot of the bad press OS X got for clunkiness.
Click to expand...

I second this.

Showing the contents of the window while resizing is completely useless and waste of CPU processing.

I would pay to get rid of it if someone came out with an app to disable it.

Why can't Apple just concentrate on developing a stable & snappy OS and leave the pretty stuff for the 3rd party developers?
 
Originally posted by chrios
Im sorry to say that i think jaguar has no acceleration for window resizing. It isn't a graphical function that QE can speed up. The CPU must recalculate all of the relative locations for frames, buttons, and text. Then it renders the window and sends it to the graphics card. Dragging it should be faster because that is offloaded to the GPU because the "image" has already been made by the OS.

I was angry too, but for complex windows like project builder, and entourage.. It's gonna have to be a fact of life.
Click to expand...

Apple tells us differently, just look at the graph way down on this page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html

I think your thoughts about resizing cannot be sped up really sound absolutely valid, so I kinda think if Apple is makin something up? :confused:
 
Apple tells us differently, just look at the graph way down on this page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html
Click to expand...

That darn graph is what convinced me to by the 8500 in the first place! And you are right - the middle chart "2D Graphics Performance WIndow Resize" -
shows 105+ operations per second using a QE supported card to under 35 operations per second using 10.1. I guess that doesn't come out to mean very much, but it sure LOOKS impressive in the graph - "why it is like 5 times bigger. Thisis going to be great!"

Then you notice that both graph 1 and 2 (1 being Window Move) are both in operations per second, but the scale is 400 operations per second for the first graph and 140 operations per second for the window resize graph.

By golly, I forgot day one of Statistics 101 where our teacher showed us how people like USA Today do this sort of thing to basically trick you into seeing what they want you to see vs. what is really happening.

If Apple had been statistically honest on this chart it would have looked something like this:

newgraph.jpg


Tells a different story doesn't it! I guess I should have read it more carefully, but whoever made this chart was successful in getting me (a loyal and enthusiastic Apple customer) to see it their way.
 
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