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andreas_g4 · Feb 9, 2003, 07:36 PM

What I was thinking about a while ago is:

Imagine Motorola had done a better job and the G4 was competitive all the time and would be still, or IBM would have come out with the 970 much earlier, just imagine.
In that case, would we have stuff like Quartz Extreme? I mean, did Apple only develop technologies like this due to the lack of CPU power? I think so, but I'm anything but an expert in that.
If that's true, it has one more advantage than QE today (where we urgently need it): We will have it tomorrow!
I'm pretty sure the next gen processor, PPC 970 or what ever, will be able to handle the UI of Mac OS X very well, besides all other tasks. But there will be no need for it to do so, because of QE. That makes Apple much more competitive in the future.

Today we need it, tomorrow we just have it.

Or am I on the wrong path...?

Agasthya · Feb 9, 2003, 07:41 PM

Originally posted by andreas_g4:
What I was thinking about a while ago is:

Imagine Motorola had done a better job and the G4 was competitive all the time and would be still, or IBM would have come out with the 970 much earlier, just imagine.
In that case, would we have stuff like Quartz Extreme? I mean, did Apple only develop technologies like this due to the lack of CPU power? I think so, but I'm anything but an expert in that.
If that's true, it has one more advantage than QE today (where we urgently need it): We will have it tomorrow!
I'm pretty sure the next gen processor, PPC 970 or what ever, will be able to handle the UI of Mac OS X very well, besides all other tasks. But there will be no need for it to do so, because of QE. That makes Apple much more competitive in the future.

Today we need it, tomorrow we just have it.

Or am I on the wrong path...?

The way that the UIs have been progressing, I think it would have been pretty inevitable for one of the major OS manufacturers to make a fully graphics card enhanced UI just to make things run much smoother. But thats just my opinion.

Apple Pro Underwear · Feb 9, 2003, 07:47 PM

does faster video card translate to more productive QE?

poocat · Feb 9, 2003, 08:08 PM

ms is working on their own graphical offloading system for the next version of windows. it's coming for everyone sooner or later, apple was just first (i think. i'm not aware of what's available for linux, and they may well have already had it). so yes is the answer to your first question.

though the processors probably made them kick it up a notch on the importance scale.

pc.

mitchell_pgh · Feb 9, 2003, 08:23 PM

Yes, we would have had QE either way... OS X is very graphice intensive, so they kicked it onto the priority list.

M$ is coming out with their own version.

But if we had 5 Ghz chips... I don't think it would have been high on the list...

Gul Banana · Feb 9, 2003, 08:35 PM

I don't think QE is that big of an advantage yet. Accelerated compositing is nice, especially for cool translucency effects, but imagine if it accelerated scrolling and resizing too.. both within the realms of theoretical possibility.

Northform · Feb 9, 2003, 10:09 PM

Well, Microsoft is tring to produce a QE like system for the Windows after next in order to take some of the load off of their processors. It doesn't seem like it is something that the industry sees as a drawback no matter what the CPU. Apple just got there first.

Rickster · Feb 9, 2003, 10:27 PM

Accelerated live window resizing isn't within the realm of theoretical possibility. Or at least, not the kind everyone seems to be asking for. The window server already uses the GPU for as much as it possibly can during a window resize: allocating real estate and compositing the buffer onto the screen. What makes smooth window resizing not toally smooth in many case is that the window has to be filled with pixels by the application; for many cases, that's a CPU-bound operation. GPUs aren't designed to render PDF or Flash or HTML or even to rasterize text (they're fast at pushing pixels because they're designed exclusively for pushing pixels).

Accelerated scrolling is closer to possible. In fact, it's already done to some extent. In each step of a scroll, most of the window content has already been rasterized, it just needs to be moved to a new location. Under Quartz Extreme, the GPU is used for that, so that the application only has to draw the content that's been revealed by scrolling. It might also be possible to do scrolling by changing the scroll-view architecture so that the entire document content is drawn immediately (instead of just the visible part), and hardware acceleration is used to move the whole thing around and clip it to the visible rect. That wouldn't be possible for all apps, though, as it'd require either new APIs or a lot more work on the system's part to figure out what apps are doing.

Oh, yeah, the original question? I think we'd have still seen QE even if CPUs had been much faster the last few years. Regardless of the speed of the CPU, it makes good use of the trend in graphics hardware development to let the GPU do more of the work: even gamers with 3GHz dual P4s appreciate that the latest games have much more sophisticated AI and physics (and that's due to operations like lighting being offloaded to the GPU).

Superchicken · Feb 9, 2003, 10:34 PM

Would we get it yeah would we have gotten it by now? Nope. If you look at the mac machines out there, QE came out while apple was still and is still selling old iMacs with junky video cards. It would have made more sense had at least one past iBook had a QE capable graphics card.

Microsoft has no need for a GUI speed enhancer why... they're runnin on 3Ghz P4s for goodness sake!

not to mention windows doesn't do near as much GUI intensive stuff as OS X does... after a while though I bet M$ will try and encourage new box sales by incorperating cool gui effects like apple does.