[BoulderDash]

I have 2 G3's (Yosemites) and an iBook (Dual USB) running 10.2.6 and my OS X mice pointers have no drop shadow. However, my neighbor got one of the new aluminum PowerBooks running 10.2.6 and his mouse pointer has a drop shadow.

What's the deal (is it hardware specific)?

Thanks,
BD

[MaxPower2k3]

i believe your computer must be Quartz Extreme-enabled for the drop shadow to appear. I think that this requires 16mb of ram on your graphics card, but i'm not positive.

[himself]

Originally posted by MaxPower2k3:
i believe your computer must be Quartz Extreme-enabled for the drop shadow to appear. I think that this requires 16mb of ram on your graphics card, but i'm not positive.

Wrong, wrong wrong. Shadowed cursors are a separate function of your video cards ability render alpha channels (transparency) and other graphics features on cursors in hardware.

Totally unrelated to Quartz Extreme. If you need more info, read this thread.

[BoulderDash]

Word up... thanks!

[smeger]

Also, since this hasn't come up for awhile, I'll remind everyone that you can use a dropshadowed cursor on a machine that doesn't support it by installing Mighty Mouse.

[MaxPower2k3]

Originally posted by himself:
Wrong, wrong wrong. Shadowed cursors are a separate function of your video cards ability render alpha channels (transparency) and other graphics features on cursors in hardware.

Totally unrelated to Quartz Extreme. If you need more info, read this thread.

ah, ok. thanks for clarifying

[fireside]

i find it amusing in a bad way that the regular pointer doesnt have a dropshadow, while all the other macos x pointers do, like the beachball. heh, you probably see that more than the regular one, eh?

[zachs]

Originally posted by himself:
Wrong, wrong wrong. Shadowed cursors are a separate function of your video cards ability render alpha channels (transparency) and other graphics features on cursors in hardware.

Totally unrelated to Quartz Extreme. If you need more info, read this thread.

No, no no. My pointer had a dropshadow in the early builds of Jaguar.

[Taipan]

Hi!

It has nothing to do with QuartzExtreme. On my Umax S900 with an ATI Radeon the shadow appeared when I installed an ATI software update (and it never disappeared again when I installed Apple updates that included changes to the ATI drivers). Just today I sold the Radeon to a friend of mine, and when he put it into his Powermac G3 b/w the shadow was gone (it was there with the Rage 128 he had before), and also appeared again after an ATI update.

[smeger]

Here's my response from the thread linked to by 'himself'. It explains what's going on:

There are two seperate mechanisms. The first is a system API called something like UsesHardwareCursor. The answer is dependent upon your video card. If it returns affirmative, you get a shadowed cursor.

Then, there's QE. This also depends on the graphics card, but it uses different criteria to determine whether or not it's enabled.

Hence, you get the legend that they're one and the same. They're not, but there's a lot of overlap - if your graphics card supports one, it's pretty likely (but not definite) that it'll support the other.

[Webscreamer]

Originally posted by zachs:
No, no no. My pointer had a dropshadow in the early builds of Jaguar.

Very very true... your "theory" doesn't work here

[goMac]

The shadow requires a Radeon or better on any machine (pci or agp).

[himself]

Originally posted by Webscreamer:
Very very true... your "theory" doesn't work here

What, what what... the deal with that is the earlier builds of Jaguar had the cursor dropshadow functions in software (well, handled by the main processor). The final release loaded the pointer dropshadow onto the graphics hardware, and thus, if your graphics card isn't up to snuff (per Apples criteria) your pointer dropshadow was gone...

If the pointer dropshadow is that important to you though, just get Might Mouse, like 'smeger' suggested.

[qnxde]

A pointer drop shadow doesn't technically require quartz extreme (as demonstrated by early jaguar builds and shadows on alternate pointer icons) but Apple has chosen to disable it in software on non quartz extreme machines for performance and visual reasons. Play a resized quicktime movie and bring down a menu over the top of the window and watch the video go blocky. It's because it can't accelerate that area with opengl and has to compute the shadow in software. A mouse shadow would have the same effect on a non QE machine and generally slow things down (by how much I have no idea)

[smeger]

I did some testing on my non-QE machine with a shadowed mouse using Mighty Mouse to see what impact it had on performance. I couldn't find any impact within the tolerance of my testing.

I think the reason that they disable it on particular machines is, as qnxde says, it looks like crap over directly-buffered video such as a DVD. But it looks great everywhere else and I don't watch many DVDs, so I use it.

[Busemann]

How come the drop shadow dissapears when you connect your comp. to a TV (and QE is de-activated)

I believe Apple uses the shadow to show whether QE is on or not, even if the card could only display the shadow.

[dfiler]

You can have QE without a cursor shadow.
You can have a cursor shadow without QE.

Both QE and cursor-shadow support are dependant on the abilities of your video card. Neither relies upon the other. They have no form of causal relationship with each other whatsoever.

[moki]

Originally posted by Busemann:
How come the drop shadow dissapears when you connect your comp. to a TV (and QE is de-activated)

I believe Apple uses the shadow to show whether QE is on or not, even if the card could only display the shadow.

No, they do not. What others have stated in this thread is correct... cursors with shadows is independent of QE.