[tkmd]

will core image speed up the general snappiness of OS X? Will any code for CI be written into the OS to compose windows faster ? I guess I am confused between the benefits of quartz extreme and core image. core image only works on programs that change images or movies only?

[UnixMac]

Good question, I too would like to better understand that as well as the whole purpose of putting a video encoding subsystem into the latest generation GPU's... does OS X automatically use those, or does software have to be coded to use that feature of the GPU?

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by UnixMac:
Good question, I too would like to better understand that as well as the whole purpose of putting a video encoding subsystem into the latest generation GPU's... does OS X automatically use those, or does software have to be coded to use that feature of the GPU?

Judging by your signature, I don't think you need to worry about any snappiness... Wow.

G5 Dual 2.5Ghz, 4.0GB Crucial RAM, WD Raptor 10000RPM 74GB System Drive, Maxtor MaXline II user 250GB HD, LaCie 90GB firewire drive, (takes a breath, ahh) GeForce6800, 23" aluminum display, Sonnet Tango 2.0, iSight, Bluetooth keyboard & mouse, Sound Sticks, HP 7760 printer bla..bla..

[monkeybrain]

UnixMac, I think your impressive signature might be making my window very wide - can you make it span two lines perhaps? Cheers

Don't know about this core image, it was my impression that it wasn't used for the interface apart from specific cases (like system prefs). I would think Apple will optimize it pretty well though, and it would run fine on any newish-system (everything in last couple of years?)

[bborofka]

Every .x increment in Mac OS X we've seen has brought us a modest improvement to the overall responsiveness of Aqua, but never to the point where we are generally satisfied. Of course, OS X and Quartz is "doing a lot more" than OS 9 and Windows are doing, thus using more resources, it still seems like improvements could be made, especially when some people say that a 350MHz G3 is just as (un)responsive as a 1GHz G4 Mac.

I can't point out specific threads, but I'm pretty sure I've read reports that Tiger feels a lot snappier with CoreImage. Hopefully the technology is enough to alleviate the CPU from doing a lot of the Quartz work and let the GPU get used more.

[Semantic Mike]

How about using Core Image to apply gaussian blur when using semi-opaque windows, drop-down menus and other interface elements? Then we could get rid of those horrible horizontal lines in the menubar drop-downs!

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
Judging by your signature, I don't think you need to worry about any snappiness... Wow.

G5 Dual 2.5Ghz, 4.0GB Crucial RAM, WD Raptor 10000RPM 74GB System Drive, Maxtor MaXline II user 250GB HD, LaCie 90GB firewire drive, (takes a breath, ahh) GeForce6800, 23" aluminum display, Sonnet Tango 2.0, iSight, Bluetooth keyboard & mouse, Sound Sticks, HP 7760 printer bla..bla..

Coud you make that a "quote" note "code" please, so that it wraps. Not everybody is on a 30" cinema display already.

CoreImage will reduce the snappiness of the system because more effects will be used. Instead of just showing applications they will first ripple for half a minute in Tiger.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
Judging by your signature, I don't think you need to worry about any snappiness... Wow.

G5 Dual 2.5Ghz, 4.0GB Crucial RAM, WD Raptor 10000RPM 74GB System Drive, Maxtor MaXline II user 250GB HD
LaCie 90GB firewire drive, (takes a breath, ahh) GeForce6800, 23" aluminum display, Sonnet Tango 2.0, iSight, Bluetooth keyboard & mouse
Sound Sticks, HP 7760 printer bla..bla..

Originally posted by monkeybrain:
UnixMac, I think your impressive signature might be making my window very wide - can you make it span two lines perhaps? Cheers

Don't know about this core image, it was my impression that it wasn't used for the interface apart from specific cases (like system prefs). I would think Apple will optimize it pretty well though, and it would run fine on any newish-system (everything in last couple of years?)

Well, I basically believe in buying a computer every 5 years or so, may last dual 500 G4, was it that time top of the line and did well by me for the 5 years till this showed up on the doorstep.

As for the signature, it started out as a spoof cause I saw a few guys list every item they own in their signature (down to the type of mouse pad they have) and I made my own... however, it comes in handy when asking questions for people to know "where you're coming from" ... back when my signature was my dual 500mhz... the answer was usually "upgrade".

I sure hope core image does something to speed up aqua. While it's fast.. it doesn't seem as snappy as OS 9 used to be or for that matter Winblows XP. I understand QT, FCP, etc.. and other video type software will benefit from GPU's with Video encoding however so I guess that's a plus.

[Macanoid]

someone told me Apple is in the process of switching from HFS to NFS and this switch will make the system a lot more responsive/snapper. I'm not sure if that's true or that it even makes sense, just quoting a small developer.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by Macanoid:
someone told me Apple is in the process of switching from HFS to NFS and this switch will make the system a lot more responsive/snapper. I'm not sure if that's true or that it even makes sense, just quoting a small developer.

great idea.. but won't it wreak havoc on the current software and people's current HD's? We'll all have to reformat, won't we?

[Macanoid]

that was my first question exactly!! As I'm no developer I can' answer that.

[Dog Like Nature]

Originally posted by Macanoid:
someone told me Apple is in the process of switching from HFS to NFS and this switch will make the system a lot more responsive/snapper. I'm not sure if that's true or that it even makes sense, just quoting a small developer.

Ummm, that doesn't make any sense.
NFS is for remote volumes, not local volumes.

See: RFC3530

[jamil5454]

NFS is a network-mounted filesystem. It's used to export UNIX filesystems to other machines and network booting. I think it's something else...

Anyway, you can download the new filesystem converter/changer (?) from apple's developer connection. I think it's called Xsan.

Am I completely wrong about this?

[tkmd]

Ahem... gentlemen could we get back to the topic of core image? So far it seems no one really knows what it would do with OS snappiness.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by tkmd:
Ahem... gentlemen could we get back to the topic of core image? So far it seems no one really knows what it would do with OS snappiness.

hear hear....

I for one wonder if developers are going to go thru the trouble of optimizing apps for it. Seems like the Mac has all kinds of great advantages, like MP, Altivec, 64bit, etc.. yet so many apps are lazy and don't use that advantage. Even Apples own iApps don't all use these advantages.

[Catfish_Man]

Another question that I haven't been able to answer:

Are Quartz 2D Extreme (not the same as Quartz Extreme) and CoreImage related?

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
Are Quartz 2D Extreme (not the same as Quartz Extreme) and CoreImage related?

They're related in the same way that CoreImage is related to Quartz Extreme. All three are attempts to make more use of the graphics card. Keep in mind that I don't have Tiger, so I haven't played with two of the three technologies, but here is my understanding of them:

Quartz Extreme uses the graphics card for compositing the desktop (i.e. drawing one window on top of another). Quartz 2D Extreme will move drawing operations (e.g. text and path drawing) to the graphics card, whereas they are currently done using the CPU. CoreImage is a framework for GPU-accelerated image filters (e.g. blurring an image).

CoreImage makes it easy to have fast graphic effects -- that's it, as far as I can tell. Quartz 2D Extreme will give a general speed-bump by accelerating all drawing.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
They're related in the same way that CoreImage is related to Quartz Extreme. All three are attempts to make more use of the graphics card. Keep in mind that I don't have Tiger, so I haven't played with two of the three technologies, but here is my understanding of them:

Quartz Extreme uses the graphics card for compositing the desktop (i.e. drawing one window on top of another). Quartz 2D Extreme will move drawing operations (e.g. text and path drawing) to the graphics card, whereas they are currently done using the CPU. CoreImage is a framework for GPU-accelerated image filters (e.g. blurring an image).

CoreImage makes it easy to have fast graphic effects -- that's it, as far as I can tell. Quartz 2D Extreme will give a general speed-bump by accelerating all drawing.

do we have quartz 2D now? or is that coming with tiger?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by UnixMac:
do we have quartz 2D now? or is that coming with tiger?

Quartz 2D is what OSX uses to draw stuff. Quartz 2D Extreme is in 10.4 and uses the graphics card to draw stuff.

10.0-10.1: Quartz 2D -> Quartz Compositor -> Screen
10.2-10.3: Quartz 2D -> Quartz Extreme -> Screen
10.4 : Quartz 2D Extreme -> Quartz Extreme -> Screen

[Millennium]

From what I know of CoreImage, it won't help or hinder snappiness much, except in a few very specific areas. CoreImage is not a general-purpose drawing API, like Quartz is; it's meant for manipulating images rather than drawing them. In most places you won't notice any difference, because CoreImage won't be used there.

As for Quartz 2D Extreme, if this is actually a rewrite of Quartz to use the graphics card for all drawing (rather than just for compositing, as the current Quartz Extreme does), then this should increase the system's responsiveness. It is not strictly related to CoreImage, but they use some very similar concepts. Q2DE, however, does things which would apply in many more places, and so it should boost things almost everywhere.

[RonnieoftheRose]

Core Image and Core Video also lays the foundations for real-time special effects and embedded video in the GUI in a few years when all OSX users will have powerful enough machines. Take for example the Aqua scroll bars. In the future they'll be 3D objects, there will even be apps that have windows made of 3D tubes with real looking glass for the document window. The Terminal would look great like that. Think of the GUI computers use in a movie like Minority Report.

Video files won't be represented by an icon but a 30 second looping clip. The idea of icons itself will no longer be necassary. Double click on a file and they'll simply zoom to full size as if you had been using minimizie-in-place. CI and CV makes this all possible whereas Quartz is reaching its limits.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Macanoid:
someone told me Apple is in the process of switching from HFS to NFS and this switch will make the system a lot more responsive/snapper. I'm not sure if that's true or that it even makes sense, just quoting a small developer.

NFS? That wouldn't make sense; NFS isn't a filesystem. It's a protocol for accessing other filesystems (which can be HFS, UFS, NTFS, FAT32, or just about anything else) over the network.

Do you mean BFS, perhaps? That's the Be File System, from BeOS. It was famous for its performance optimzation, and supported many other nifty features, some of which were in HFS and some not.

Apple is not, in fact, in the process of switching to BFS. However, they hired Dominic Giampaolo, the person who created BFS, to help them improve HFS. HFS Journaling is his work, and he is doing other things as well, some of which will be in Tiger. The end goal is something called "HFS-X", a sort of next-generation filesystem. Last I heard, however, it will remain backward-compatible with previous generations, at least to some degree.

[Macanoid]

Could be, I'm not a technical person. Might be BFS indeed, something about switching to the native unix filesystem would help speeding up the system tremendously. The way it was explained made total sense at the time

As for core image - I doubt that it'll make things snappier. Part of core image/video is already available btw in Motion. It takes care of the real-time video manipulation there.

[tkmd]

I am interested in hearing about Quartz extreme 2d. I really have not heard too much about it. Quartz extreme, yes; QE2D, no.

Well google is your friend and a little digging reveals this thread. Yes its from mac rumors but its hard to find info on this. Anyone else with more information on this QE2D, is more than welcome to chime in.

If this facet of Tiger is true, why was it not advertised by Apple during the preview? It would seem to me to be a great selling point for the new OS. IMO more significant than automator, Safari with RSS...

[Gavriel]

So what will be the hardware requirements for this Quartz 2D Extreme-technology?

AFAIK Quartz required a 32 Mb graphics card and QE required a 64 Mb one. Will Quartz 2D Extreme require more VRAM and perhaps some other snazzy technology that only resides within the most recent GPU hardware?

Not that my measly 8 Mb Pismo GPU cares one way or the other, but still...

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by tkmd:
I am interested in hearing about Quartz extreme 2d. I really have not heard too much about it. Quartz extreme, yes; QE2D, no.

Well google is your friend and a little digging reveals this thread. Yes its from mac rumors but its hard to find info on this. Anyone else with more information on this QE2D, is more than welcome to chime in.

If this facet of Tiger is true, why was it not advertised by Apple during the preview? It would seem to me to be a great selling point for the new OS. IMO more significant than automator, Safari with RSS...

It surfaced in one report back around when 10.3 was in testing, and I asked about it all over the place, receiving the following answer:

Now in 10.4 it's turned up again, and I've seen some more answers, but still no real documentation on it. My guess is that the people who really need to know about it have been told about it, and us mortals will have to wait until the final developer docs to find out. An app I'm writing could almost certainly use it, but it's borked anyway at this point, so I'm not particularly annoyed about not having any info. My guess is that it'll be easy to make any necessary changes to an app anyway.

In response to Gavriel's post:

Quartz is what OSX uses to draw, if you're using OSX, you're using Quartz. It doesn't use the graphics card at all.

Quartz Extreme requires 16MB (32 recommended) of vram, and I believe it requires non-power-of-2 texture support and possibly a few other things.

Quartz 2D Extreme doesn't have any public documentation yet, but I would guess it's primarily dependent on graphics card features (shaders probably) rather than vram. I could easily be wrong though, not my area of expertise.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Macanoid:
Could be, I'm not a technical person. Might be BFS indeed, something about switching to the native unix filesystem would help speeding up the system tremendously. The way it was explained made total sense at the time

There is no "the native Unix file system". Or rather, there are hundreds of them. One, in fact, has been available in OSX since the very beginning: UFS. However, switching to this makes the system slower, not faster.

[Macanoid]

thanks for the explanation. Seems that that story was total bull**** then.

[tooki]

FYI all, it's the code tags that prevent wrapping, not the quote tags.

tooki

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by tkmd:
If this facet of Tiger is true, why was it not advertised by Apple during the preview? It would seem to me to be a great selling point for the new OS. IMO more significant than automator, Safari with RSS...

Quartz 2D Extreme is kind of a difficult technology to demonstrate, and it wasn't anywhere near completion at WWDC. Apple may not have even been sure they would be able to finish it by the time they released Tiger.

Anyway, I don't know why you're suggesting it isn't true. Several people on this board have confirmed that it's real.

[tkmd]

I didn't mean to suggest that it did not exist, rather I never heard of it before. Moreover, the fact that there is a general confusion between QE and open gl functions relating to gui speed ( at least for me ) this is great news that there development on this front.

[UnixMac]

I for one am excited about Quarts 2D extreme. This the kind of thing that I bought a high powered GPU for, and with the number of shaders in the latest NV40, it should really make the machine a lot more responsive. (I hope).

[Gavin]

What we need is a good explanation of just what Core Image is and what you can do with it in a way that answers the original question. Here's my attempt at an overview.

It a service for applications. Basically it takes the sorts of things that photoshop can do to an image and makes them available to any application.

In the same way now that any application can easily add spell checking to any text field, with Core Image any app can easily add Gaussian Blur to an image in real time. Or tons of other effects.

A programmer could add that to his application right now but he would have to write his own routines to do it and get at the graphics card to make it work fast. This requires some hard core programming, you have to be an expert with tech knowledge beyond that of the average weekend shareware author. This is what photoshop does.

So just like every app can add spell checking, drawers, rendezvous networking and customizable tool bars using tools built into OS X, with core image any app can do graphic and video manipulation that is optimized for your graphics card.

<speculation>
You could see things like omni web using it to gradually fade a blocked banner ad to invisible instead of just leaving a hole there. Mail might be able to color correct then, crop and resize a picture you drag into it. Eye candy possibilities are endless, you could have startup splash screens with animated water effects, buttons with video that do a 3D dissolve when you click them. A program could call your attention to something by having a beam of sunlight shine on it. These sorts of things will show up in $10 shareware.
</speculation>

Programs that do graphics or video manipulation now might see some speed gains by switching from their own routines to Core Image.


http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Gavin:
Programs that do graphics or video manipulation now might see some speed gains by switching from their own routines to Core Image.

This is definitely true. Apparently CI will do some crazy target specific recompiling stuff so that it uses pixel/vertex shaders, multiprocessing, and/or altivec depending on the available hardware. I don't know the details, but the people who went to that session at WWDC that have talked about it have all been very impressed.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by Gavin:
What we need is a good explanation of just what Core Image is and what you can do with it in a way that answers the original question. Here's my attempt at an overview.

It a service for applications. Basically it takes the sorts of things that photoshop can do to an image and makes them available to any application.

In the same way now that any application can easily add spell checking to any text field, with Core Image any app can easily add Gaussian Blur to an image in real time. Or tons of other effects.

A programmer could add that to his application right now but he would have to write his own routines to do it and get at the graphics card to make it work fast. This requires some hard core programming, you have to be an expert with tech knowledge beyond that of the average weekend shareware author. This is what photoshop does.

So just like every app can add spell checking, drawers, rendezvous networking and customizable tool bars using tools built into OS X, with core image any app can do graphic and video manipulation that is optimized for your graphics card.

<speculation>
You could see things like omni web using it to gradually fade a blocked banner ad to invisible instead of just leaving a hole there. Mail might be able to color correct then, crop and resize a picture you drag into it. Eye candy possibilities are endless, you could have startup splash screens with animated water effects, buttons with video that do a 3D dissolve when you click them. A program could call your attention to something by having a beam of sunlight shine on it. These sorts of things will show up in $10 shareware.
</speculation>

Programs that do graphics or video manipulation now might see some speed gains by switching from their own routines to Core Image.


http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html

Thanks, good explaination!

[tkmd]

As I re-read this thread there was a good explanation of Quartz extreme 2d versus QE (thanks chuckit). I did some searching on the web to try to clarify this further. Its from a Linux site.

http://dot.kde.org/1048476487/1048672856/1048782251/

Here's an exerp:
Re: Time to open the eyes
by Rayiner Hashem on Thursday 27/Mar/2003, @22:42
Quartz is *slow*.
>>>>>>>
Yes, it is. It's also all done in software. In OS X, Quartz Extreme (the OpenGL acceleration) only comes into play when all the drawing is done and it's time to composite all those transparent, drop-shadows windows together. All Quartz2D calls are still rendered via the CPU. The big reason Quartz Extreme was such a performance boost for the OS X folks is because, before QE, the CPU was doing all the drawing *and* all the compositing.

Blitting in OpenGL is *very* slow. Imagine what happens when a high-frame rate 2D app tries to blit everything through OpenGL. It would kill performance rather than improving it.
>>>>>>>>
Actually, the speed of 2D operations is dependent on the implementation. On workstation-level implementations, 2D operations are very fast. On many consumer level implementations, the 2D subset (glCopyPixels, etc) is (was) rather slow. I haven't benchmarked 2D operations on modern NVIDIA (or ATI) hardware, but since's NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation is good enough to be in SGI workstations (all the Intel VPro chips are modified Quadros) I'd guess 2D operations would be quite fast. Of course, all of this is rather irrelevent. The modern way to do 2D blits is with textured quads. Both the ATI and NVIDIA implementations allow you to use arbitrary texture sizes, so no scaling is involved and the end result is exactly equivalent to blitting, and is *very* fast. It should be noted that modern consumer OpenGL implementations are very good. In the past, consumer-level cards struggled if more than one OpenGL window was in use at a time. On my GeForce4Go, however, 6 glxgears shows only a nominal drop in total frame rate over the 1 window case, and with 3 windows there is actually an *increase* in total frame rate.

The usage of OpenGL only accelerates drawing in certain cases, but also *slows down* things in other cases.

I hope that this continues to reduce some of the confusion...

[Thinine]

No, in fact, that will likely increase the confusion, since it doesn't apply to Tiger.

Quartz 2D Extreme gives you a 2 - 100x real world speed up on compatible video hardware. If your GPU isn't capable of Q2DX, then you only get Quartz Extreme (like you had before, if your GPU supported that). Even if you don't have a Q2DX compatible GPU, you'll still see some speedup over Panther, since they've further optimized Quartz 2D's software drawing routines.

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by Gavriel:
So what will be the hardware requirements for this Quartz 2D Extreme-technology?

AFAIK Quartz required a 32 Mb graphics card and QE required a 64 Mb one. Will Quartz 2D Extreme require more VRAM and perhaps some other snazzy technology that only resides within the most recent GPU hardware?

Not that my measly 8 Mb Pismo GPU cares one way or the other, but still...

Quartz runs on your Pismo. QE requires 16MB VRAM and a videocard that supports some kind of function (main reason why your Pismo won't support QE, has not too much to do with VRAM). If Quartz didn't work on your Pismo you would be staring at a blank screen