Quartz 2D Extreme Disabled?

J

jzdziarski

Registered
I fired up Quartz Debugger and saw that Quartz Extreme was enabled, but Quartz 2D extreme was disabled. Is there a reason for this? I'm running a 1.67Ghz Powerbook G4, and wasn't sure what enabling this will do for (or to) me.

jonathan
 
Hmm well after running Xbench with and without Quartz 2D Extreme enabled, I'm not sure why Apple decided to disable it (at least on my machine) unless they disabled it on everyone's. At any rate, here are some XBench's with 2D disabled/enabled. Clearly there's a significant performance improvement when running 2D extreme. I've also figured out how to enable it permanently: spotlight for "Quartz Debug" and run it, then go to the tools menu and click "Enable Quartz 2D Extreme". You'll then need to kill -9 the debug process (or just force quit from the activity monitor), and the settings stick. If you don't force quit, then it turns it back off.

Very strange.

DISABLED:

Results 158.03
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4 (8A428)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook5,7
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.67 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.67 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV360M11
Drive Type ST9100823A
Quartz Graphics Test 130.23
Line 101.17 2.58 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 110.06 7.74 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 128.47 2.96 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 146.95 1.60 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 206.93 3.37 Kchars/sec
User Interface Test 200.93
Elements 200.93 64.63 refresh/sec

ENABLED:

Results 185.84
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.4 (8A428)
Physical RAM 1024 MB
Model PowerBook5,7
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.67 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.67 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV360M11
Drive Type ST9100823A
Quartz Graphics Test 180.91
Line 175.57 4.47 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 190.65 13.41 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 230.03 5.30 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 145.21 1.58 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 183.03 2.98 Kchars/sec
User Interface Test 191.04
Elements 191.04 61.45 refresh/sec
 
It's disabled because it apparently interferes with CoreImage making it slower sometimes. You can also see from your test that some things are actually slower with it enabled.

Basically the bugs aren't worked out yet but they wanted to release Tiger anyways.
 
Has apple come out and admitted this, or is this all rumor? Apple tech support was clueless about it.

True, some are a tad slower, but just by a hair...and I suspect some of that could be attributed to the different bench runs. It's a very minor decrease for a whole lot of increase though.
 
I've activated it for now and will see what it feels like (bugs, slowness, speed...). I hope there won't be too much trouble.
 
That's a nice trick. Been running it for about an hour and so far so good. No applications crashing or weird display artifacts.
 
Seems to increase Safari's window resizing a lot. With it turned off it's not that bad in Tiger as it was in Panther, but with it turned on there's a definate increase.
 
What do you mean by increase? Increase speed or increase time until the window follows the cursor?
 
Quartz Extreme 2D is still buggy, causes some artifacts and other issues. This should be fixed and enabled in 10.4.1. This has been admitted by Apple.

Brian
 
Read the arstechnica review of Tiger for a full run-down on what Q2DE is and why it's so amazingly good.

I've decided that I am certainly NOT installing Tiger on this until after Q2DE is turned on by default, and probably not until 10.4.2.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top