Slow screen redraw and scrolling with NVDAGeForce4Ti

S

Steve Balschi

Registered
Problem: Screen redraw is very bad in Classic apps and sometimes in OS10.2.3 and Photoshop 7.01.

Some of my classic apps have very bad redraw while running in OSX. Redraw problems include "multiple image artifacting" and "just plain not redrawing a part of a window that has been uncovered... the workaround is to zip the window shade up and down.

Scrolling in Photoshop 7.01 / OS 10.2.3 is very slow compared to the same file on the same machine in OS9.22/PS7.01. Making selections with wand is slower also.

All of my work is done on the LaCie monitor... Viewsonic only a pallet monitor.

Setup: I have a dual 1.2Ghz mirror front with 2Gb RAM. Running dual monitors...
M1 = NVDA,GeForce4Ti card with 128Mb and 21" LaCie monitor
M2 = ATYRV100 card with 32Mb and G90f Viewsonic monitor

Thoughts: Is there anyway to adjust speed of NVDA card? or change cache settings? Since OSX supposedly "optimizes" the RAM allocation... I know of no way to allocate more RAM to Photoshop... Files don't always run with 100% efficiency, but that doesn't seem to effect redraw speed.

Thanks in advance for any help
 
Maybe it would help to have 2 NVIDIA vid cards. Anybody have experience with using 2 video competitors in same computer? (ATI and NVIDIA) You should check to see if Quartz Extreme is fully enabled on both cards (best way is software that will detect if your hardware configuration allows Quartz Extreme)-- I believe PhotoShop has settings to allow use of more RAM by photoshop. Not a system pref, but it might help. Also, it's a known issue with OSX, many users report strange issues with more than 1.5 GB ram, try a test with just 1.5 GB or less. If you change PhotoShop memory settings, be reasonable, leave some memory for the system to use, example - 1.5 GB total Ram, 800 MB might be reasonable for PhotoShop, Good Luck!
 
I don't beleive that I could use 2 identical NVIDIA cards as I only have 1 AGP slot.

You don't get to allocate RAM in OSX... In Photoshop I already have set the max RAM to 1.5Gb... I work in big files, and one of the few reasons that I would subject myself to OSX in the first place is to utilize more than 1.5Gb total RAM and 1.Gb maximum to any single application. Using 800Mb for Photoshop is unacceptable.

I can pull the ATI card for a test to see if it is conflicting... good idea.

I don't know how to check if "Quartz Extreme is fully enabled" can you help?
 
As a test, run Photoshop at a lower memory setting, arbitrarily to 1000 MB (acceptable or not, change it to what you think you need if that makes no difference) Also take a 512 MB memory stick out, again to test, so you just have 1.5 GB, check for improvement. Do you occasionally defrag the partition where your scratch file would be (also having at least 5 times your Photoshop RAM for the scratch file) Also, what are using in Classic? Also, with QuartzExtreme, dowload and run Quartz Extreme Check (from versiontracker) this tells you if your hardware is capable of using Quartz Extreme, one reliable way to tell if Quartz extreme is in use is with a screensaver that shows a photo library, QE will blend from one image to the next, QE disabled, will simply flash from one to the next. Some people say to look for a drop shadow on the mouse cursor, but that is not reliable.
 
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