[macintologist]

I installed OS X 10.2 on my rev a. iMac w/ 192MB ram and upgraded from 2 to 6 MB of VRAM. I completely wiped the hard drive clean before installing.

However, obviously it is much slower than my flat panel imac/800. I think the key to a more repsonsive GUI would be for the anti-aliasing of text in the Quartz engine to be completely disabled. (Civ III plays twice as fast when Quartz is disabled for text). Does anyone know how this can be done.


PS - Yes, I DID go into the System preferences -> General -> "Turn off text smoothing for fonts 12 and below" but it doesn't disable ALL the small text smoothing.

[mrmister]

I think TinkerTool lets you do that...not for all, but a lot of them.

[macintologist]

Yes I do have Tinker Tool. Every time I check all the "disable font smoothing boxes" I would say, go to another tab, then come back and the boxes are not checked! Then I try it again. I check the disable smooth fonts boxes, quit system prefs, launch system pref, go to Tinker tool and the boxes are dimmed and not checked!

Is there possibly a Terminal solution to this? I would be confortable with that.

[macmike42]

You can no longer entirely disable text smoothing in Jaguar. You can try:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleAntiAliasThreshold 9999

(or something very similar, don't quote me on that) from a shell, but it will only disable about 70% of the system-wide anti-aliasing. It looks very bad. Turning off text smoothing will not give you any noticable performance gain. Apple's anti-aliasing routines are extremely well optimized, and the text renderer is designed to use it (hence why it won't turn off completely anymore). Try using ShadowKiller or WindowShade X to turn off window drop shadows. It makes no noticeable difference on a G4, but it does on a G3, especially one with a RAGE II or Pro video chip. Also, seriously consider getting a Rage 128 or Radeon.

[fulmer]

Originally posted by macmike42:
seriously consider getting a Rage 128 or Radeon.

unfortunately the iMac's gpu is not upgradeable. Guess his only option is to get a newer computer if he wants to run OS X at a nice clip.

[wataru]

Get more RAM! RAM is key.

I got my mom using 10.2 on a rev. B iMac with 384MB of RAM, and it runs well enough.

[Northform]

Text smoothing doesn't slow down the OS by any factor that you, or most machines, could notice.

The Civ 3 thing is because it was a hacked addon that wasn't meant to be.

The only way that AA slows down your computer is if it is done incorrectly like in old versions of Chimera/Navigator of Civ 3.

Compare IE with and without it. You won't see any change.

[Boochie]

Pretty close. The command you want is:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleAntiAliasingThreshold <x>

where <x> is the threshold above which fonts should be anti-aliased. Using an enormous number like 9999 will effectively shut it off.

Note that you can use this command on an application-by-application basis, to fine-tune each program's threshold at which anti-aliasing kicks in.

For example, I find Quicken to be unusable if anti-aliasing is disabled under OS X, because of terrible font spacing. I overrode the system-wide setting for Quicken with the following terminal command:

defaults write com.intuit.quicken AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 8

Photoshop crashes on me if I use too high a system threshold, so I reset that one too:

defaults write com.adobe.photoshop AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 8

and so on.

Of course, the question comes up, how do I find the right preferences domain? You can infer the pattern from the above examples, but say you wanted to find the preferences domain for powerpoint. Typing:

defaults find powerpoint

would tell you the contents of the domain com.microsoft.powerpoint.

Try it, it's fun!

Originally posted by macmike42:
You can no longer entirely disable text smoothing in Jaguar. You can try:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleAntiAliasThreshold 9999