[nagromme]

My bronze PBook 333/ Rage Pro/192 RAM seems to have far worse graphics performance across the board in X vs. 9. That's in X, in Classic, in 2D, and in 3D. I am suspecting, after hearing similar reports from others, that Rage Pro may not really be supported by X yet. What have other Rage Pro users found?

I tried all of the following and they are slowed to a crawl--1/2 to 1 fps:

Descent 3 in Classic
X's OpenGL screen savers
Maya Paint Effects screen saver
iTunes visualizer
PixelToy 2.5 (carbonized, runs great in 9 alone, not in X alone.)
Anf of course, window and menu drawing (but a few things like the Dock are lighting-fast)

Impressive that D3 even runs in X, though--it even plays online just fine. In fact, Classic runs everything I have tried, lots of heavy-duty apps, old and new.

X is an amazing OS, and already going back to 9 is painful. I'm typing this from X in the truly terrible IE 5 Preview! But this performance question is one I hope has a good answer. X can't just be for top-end G4s, can it?

On the other hand, app-loading and 'net access are also terribly slow, so perhaps it's a system wide slowdown unrelated to graphics hardware. Maybe an updated X will speed things up for all of us, even the high-end Macs that don't even notice that performance is not what it could be.

(Update! Net access is faster now--I just ditched IE5 for OmniWeb.)

------------------
nagromme

Mac.Descent3.net / Beginner.Descent3.net / RedFactionMac
Rear Admiral, Apple Corps High Command

[nagromme]

In the interests of completeness, I should note that I am looking at the speed of Classic apps now, and they are very snappy comapred to X apps. I notice NO difference in speed between Classic and 9 alone. Pretty impressive. I can zip back and forth across the top menus and they go in a flash just like in 9. So the performance issues seem to be in Aqua--and of course OpenGL: D3 is Classic, yet still unusably slow for now.

I'm posting from Netscape 4.7 under Classic. Browsing is fast, as with OmniWeb. Forget IE5 until another version.

[warpmoon]

no, from what I can gather, there isn't any support for the Rage Pro cards in Mac OS X...

for example, there isnt any sign of a driver-file in:

/system/library/extensions/

[juanvaldes]

Originally posted by warpmoon:
no, from what I can gather, there isn't any support for the Rage Pro cards in Mac OS X...

for example, there isnt any sign of a driver-file in:

/system/library/extensions/

That might explain why my DP 450 performs like a low end G3 in X. I thought so... I hope they fix this soon ie [b]BEFORE[/b} the 10.1 release in July.


[This message has been edited by juanvaldes (edited 04-03-2001).]

[QEGuyFromATI]

Currently there is support for the 128 family of cards and the Radeon. A DP450 would have a 128Pro in it which is supported in OS X. Classic is going to be slower than "normal" 9.1 so lower performance is to be expected in that environment.


Frag on,

Eric

ATI Research Inc.

[a2daj]

juanvaldes,
There's a significant difference between a Rage Pro and a Rage 128 Pro. Your G4 DP450 came with a Rage 128 Pro.