[Toyin]

I realize that a lot of folks are frustrated about the speed of OSX (mostly G3 owners) and that I bunch of folks don't believe the benefit of the G4 velocity engine or of extra ram. So I filmed myself resizing windows and using the genie effect. While not as smooth as it should be, resizing on my machine is tolerable (DP500 768MB Ram, ATI Radeon).

My 1st quicktime movie Warning! 880KB

While I realize that Apple has got some serious work to do with graphics it's actually not that bad on new hardware (and remember the CPU is still doing most of the heavy lifting).

The goal of this thread was to make some comparisons. The major complaint in GUI speeds seems to be resizing and menus. In the above clip you can here the mouse clicks and see how fast the menus drop. You can see the mouse and how far behind the windows lag. Are people seeing faster or slower GUI actions. What is considered slow?

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-Toyin

ToyinFayemi.com

[milhous]

that is excellent! what we need more on the site is some more personal video clips to show actual real-world performance differences.

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"the computer for the rest of us...." -SJ

[Gee4orce]

I don't have a camera handy, but I can tell you that window sizing on my iMac DV SE 400 is much slower than in your movie. (and I wasn't even complaining about it !)

If your's is : *..*..*..*..*..*..*..*
then mine is : *..........*..........*

Where '.' is a mouse movement, and '*' is a redraw.

[Kosmo]

The above clip is the same speed as my DP 450 with a GIG of RAM. Can someone tell me how Apple made those QT movies on their OS X site? IF I knew how I would make some myself and post them here.

If not I guess I could do the camcorder thing like the guy did above, but the way Apple has it would be better.

This is a great idea for people with fast machines AND slow ones, real world looks...who could agrue with that?

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http://www.manzione.com/
MacNETv2 coming July 2001

[edddeduck]

Kosmo

I think ambrosia have a video capture screen program. Look on woz.com as woz was talking about it I while (few weeks) ago... In the good apps section

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450DP/448MB/80GB/Rage/Zip250/ZipCD/Epson740

ICQ 60617180

I Took The Red Pill

[Toyin]

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. My screen is set at 1056 x 792 with colors set to millions.

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-Toyin

ToyinFayemi.com

[Kristoff]

You guys are funny.
I use so many OS and window managers.
I find the aqua wm to run perfectly fine on my Pismo 500 w/256 Megs.
I really can't comprehend how the nano-second differences between window resizing on different OS / WM combinations could possibly affect your work.

[Toyin]

True, the purpose of the thread wasn't to say that re-sizing is slowing any one down. At that speed, my work flow isn't interrupted. But sluggish performance will effect sales when you have a windows box that's 1/2 the price which resizes and launches applications much faster than the Mac. Some will say, well I/O and networking is much faster on the Mac, but let's face it, all you can really appreciate in a computer store is app launch times and GUI speed.

My 550mhz Pentium III with Winblows 98 and a Voodoo3dfx card resizes windows faster than the Dual G4. It doesn't redraw the window as well or as often as the G4. but the mouse stays with the window corner making it appear faster than the Mac.

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-Toyin

ToyinFayemi.com

[SkullMacPN]

How did Apple make it's videos? I'd do it like this...

� 1 Mac running OS 9 (just about any G4 would do) with a high-resolution video capture card and software capable of capturing the video (Final Cut Pro for example).
� 1 Mac running OS X (a super secret DP 733 ;P) with a retail ATi card that supports S-Video out.

S-Video out from the OS X box and into the OS 9 box.

Of course, if you're an Apple hardware engineer, you'd probably know how to directly link the video circitry of the OS X box to the OS 9 box (thus avoiding the conversion from digital to analog and back again).

[ckohler]

I'm glad to see someone actually posted one of these. I suggested the idea of doing some video captures of our OSX desktops three months ago but no one ever took me up on the idea (and I was without a camera). I may be able to borrow a DV cam soon. If I do, I'll grab some performance tests on my system as well for compairison. (G4 Cube 450 w/ 320mb)

[gorgonzola]

Maybe you don't realize it, but that's really fast. I was completely blown away by the speed of the Finder resizing in Column View actually. VERY fast. (relatively, of course).

What I'd really like to see is a perfect G4/G3 comparison -- i.e. same MHz, about the same RAM, same graphics card, same resolution.

Anybody up to it? I'm going to buy a new machine this summer and I'm having a hard time deciding between the iBook and the T4. If the G4 chip really makes a big difference I'll go Titanium.

So go make some movies!

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[Embermage]

Wow, that is insanely fast! My iMac (400MHz, 384MB RAM) can't get anywhere near that. That's like how KDE resized windows when I had Yellow Dog Linux installed.

I think I'm in the same boat as gorgonzola. I want an iBook, but until I know how fast OS X will be on it, I'll wait. If it won't be good, I may have to go for a G4 cube, or tower, but the TiBook is a bit out of my price range...

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Embermage
[email protected]
http://www.mactavern.com
MacTavern's Forum

[spectre]

Wow.. Resizing looks very fast in that movie! Of course.. I'm comparing it to my Rev A iMac

Ben

[Mr K]

Excellent idea!

Most people post "well mine's really really fast but a little slow"

thankyou!

It looks GREAT!

-K

[SillyMonk]

Thanks for the Geek Porn!

[seb2]

i was really impressed with the resizing speed in the video. i *do* love os x and i think it's an excellent os, but the finder is kind of slow.

when connecting to my idsik the finder doesn't respond for quite a while...

still, greatest os ever!

running it on my ti 400/384.

[Gerson]

Anyone with an iMac want to make a video of resizing in OS X for comparison??

Personally, I found it pretty jerky. My Win2K box is just insanely smooth. If they're going to implement these things - which obviously can be implemented perfectly fine with existing technology - they need to do it right.

A great counter-example is the mouse cursor. A *lot* of effort was expended in making the Mac (and Lisa AFAIK) have smooth movement of the mouse cursor, since users would percieve the system as being slower than it actually was if it moved jerkily. In truth, the Mac was very slow indeed (the CPU was decent - it was just overburdened) but the user perception was overcome.

Toyin is quite right in finding that what people think is often more important than what actually is. 'Course we all knew that since we're Mac folks - lots of people thought DOS and Win3.1 were worthwhile, and we were pretty sure that they were wrong, but it didn't have any effect.

Resizes have to be done in real time; it's an absolute necessity. The visual quality of the resize - though highly desirable - is what has to go.

Of course the real, real problem is Quartz. It's such a bad idea. No one in the world had more than a passing interest in implementing DPS, and the world continued to design GPUs for mainstream graphics systems. Well, it's still a bad idea, and I don't see the world beating down a path to Apple's door to standardize on PDF-based graphics systems. It is cool, true, but it remains unfeasible.

Worse still, there's really very little that it nets us that is unavailable elsewhere: You've been able to print PDFs of things you're working on for _years_; real-time resizes, drop shadows, etc. are possible w/o Quartz, as evidenced by Win2K; much as DTP folks such as myself might appreciate more accurate onscreen displays, we get by alright with a fast and marginally inaccurate one now. (besides, IIRC Quartz turns out not to be all that good at that - perhaps someone can discuss this further)

What precisely are we getting out of Quartz that's worth all the slowdowns? That can't be done any other way? I can't imagine. Something like the Genie effects would certainly not qualify, IMHO. (again, they're cool, they serve a useful albiet rapidly annoying function. But I'd give 'em up for snappy performance)

What it really comes down to is Steve's hubris. DPS was how NeXT did it, so *obviously* it was the only way that could be considered for OS X despite all real-world experience indicating that it was a dead end. It certainly isn't the only bad NeXTism to have wound up in OS X. Too bad that we missed out on some of the good ones - paletteable menus, for example.

[billybob]

Yah, im with gorgonzola... I dont think you realize how insanely fast that is relative to us people with imacs (especially those with rage pro's )... I havent had a chance to use OSX on a G4... I'm drooling.

[iGoof]

...i really dig that vertical dock. Way better than bottom horizontal.

[BuonRotto]

My Indigo iBook has much slower window resizing but I don't have the means to make a video of it.

Cpt., if you don't understand what Quartz is good for you have a myopic idea of what displays are good for. The differences between print, screen, monitor, projector, film and other media is quickly being erased. Welcome to the world of Apple, often a little ahead of the curve, sometimes a little too far ahead for their own good.

Buon-
Well, much as I'd like to see the lines blurred, I don't think that we're there yet, but it _is_ turning people off to OS X. Meanwhile, where is the immediate payoff with Quartz? What does it do right now that both cannot be done on the older generation of graphics models (e.g. XWindows, Windows, QuickDraw) and is worth doing so badly?

I work in DTP, and even then, the number of people who desperately need 100% accurate onscreen rendering of PostScript strikes me as low. Again, everyone would appreciate it, but only if it had no strings attached. Were this otherwise, wouldn't you have thought that NeXTStep would have caught on in printing houses that could have afforded it? Mine has Illustrator, I recall that Framemaker was available, as were a number of NeXT-based apps that were really really good with PS. But there weren't really enough to support them in that market. People are willing to put up with things that are 'good enough' and I can accept that, if fixing one would cause harm elsewhere. Me, I do things that don't require accurate previews of printing - browsing the web, for example - more than I do things that do.

What you're saying reminds me of the Newton. If Apple is so far ahead of its time that it's detremental, they put themselves in the dangerous position of harming themselves so badly now that it will never pay off. Sure, the Newt handwriting recognition improved greatly - but by then, no one cared. (and of course, it cost too much, but we're not seeing that problem solved either)

While I always liked the promise of DPS, and I'd want a Quartz workalike at some point (if the effect is identical, it can be run by pixies for all I care) but I think that we're being asked to pay too high a price for it now.

[gorgonzola]

kangarooski:

I understand your point. However, note that no one will support something if you don't invent it first. Graphics cards have basically been at a standstill, technologically speaking, because 2nd generation graphics layers have been the only kind of graphics layers available for years. However, note that it wasn't always this way.

When they introduced the original Macintosh, Apple introduced QuickDraw. While it seems blazingly fast now, it really wasn't in '84 because graphics cards (ever heard this before?) didn't support it. In fact, it was significantly slower than the PC counterpart because of this, but all its users felt that the benefits one gets with the GUI are worth the tradeoff in speed. QuickDraw, in fact, was not accelerated for many, many years (I think about 10), and yet it remained.

The point is this: if someone didn't go and invent a 3rd generation graphics layer (the definition of which we shouldn't go into right now, as it's way OT), no one would support it. Advances in display technology would really be much slower in coming.

We wait for Quartz acceleration as users of the 128k waited for QuickDraw acceleration. And when the time comes, Mac OS X will seem as great to you as Mac OS 9 does right now.

Some things need time, is all. Quartz is one of them.

Clearly, this isn't an excuse for Apple (as there's nothing to excuse -- there's nothing to be done about it at this point), but it is an explanation for why Quartz is a good thing, despite its current sluggishness.

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

Gorgonzola-
Quite true. The Mac was roundly (and appropriately, though I appreciate that it was very difficult just to get a 1bit bitmap at the 512 x 342 resolution) criticized for not having color or a larger screen back in the day. But the time it took to get beyond that was a trial by fire for the Mac. It survived but was in no way helped by having to suffer those limitations.

The question is, can Apple afford to wait the possibly ten years that it will take for the problems involved in designing such accellerators and rolling them out? Can it survive for even a year with poor graphics performance, given the landscape of the industry? I'll make no bones about it - I'm more concerned with the immediate survival of Apple than I am in developing technologies that may or may not (there is no assurance of 3rd gen GPUs being useful for Quartz - something else may arise) pay off a significant amount of time later.

And in the case of Quartz, most of the visible nicities are available on 2nd gen systems. Creating, moving, scrolling, resizing, and destroying various GUI widgets (windows, icons, pointers) are operations that happen all the time and which were previously acceptably fast. Transparencies, drop shadows, double-buffered widgets - these are not exclusive to Quartz. Though there may be other things that are useful about Quartz, e.g. perfect font hinting, they're not nearly so commonplace or commonly noticed.

Is anyone actually developing a Quartz GPU? Have they announced it? Is it probable, given the tiny marketshare and lack of applicability to other market segments? Although I've heard talk of utilizing 3d cards to speed up Quartz, I've also heard a lot of debate over the feasibility of such a scheme, and am not particularly confident given the lack of big-name authorities chiming in.

I'm all for Apple trying to improve the state of the art, but I don't think that they're going to do it, though I do think that it'll be just another thing that helps drag them down. The end user experience is worth many times more than any particular technology that makes it happen.

[gorgonzola]

kangarooski:

This is a very interesting topic, but I don't want to mess up this thread with all that information.

I've created a new thread on the Nature of Quartz, so please join me there and we'll talk it out.

Should be an interesting thread.

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

[Apfhex]

Wow, Toyin, that resizing and minimizing has got to be AT *LEAST* twice as fast as it appears on my 400MHz G3. You're lucky.

I wish I had a new DP G4 now...

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. : [ Apfhex ] : .

[Gee4orce]

Gorgonzola: don't get the TiBook - look at the price, it's (in the UK anyway) �1000 more than the iBook. For that, you can buy a G4 Cube ! So, instead of a single somewhat fast laptop, you'd have a somewhat slower laptop (but not by much for most things), and a somewhat faster desktop machine.

Literally 2 for the price of 1 !

[ntsc]

I'm on an iMac DV 400Mhz G3, 320MB RAM, Stock HardDrive(10GB), ATI Rage 128 8MB VRAM, Mac OS X 10.0.3, Million Of Colours 1024x768.

Here's my movie click on imac_resize.mov.

Take a look...

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"It is easy to be brave from a safe distance"
-Aesop

iMac DV 400Mhz
Mac OS X 10.0.3
320MB RAM

[This message has been edited by ntsc (edited 05-17-2001).]

[This message has been edited by ntsc (edited 05-17-2001).]

[Milio]

Originally posted by ntsc:
I'm on an iMac DV 400Mhz G3, 320MB RAM, Stock HardDrive(10GB), ATI Rage 128 8MB VRAM, Mac OS X 10.0.3, Million Of Colours 1024x768.

Thanks for posting that. Now make that even slower and that's what I'm seeing on my Beige Rev A G3/233 with 192MB RAM and RageIIc video.

[Gerson]

Well, there really is a significant difference between the iMac and the G4. Now we know that the G4 owners aren't just blindly adoring Steve Jobs, and the iMac owners aren't just whiners who are afraid of change.

I'm glad we got that cleared up.

[JoeyA]

> Well, there really is a significant difference between the iMac and the G4.

The odd thing is my G4 Cube 450 w/ 448 MB of RAM performs almost identical to the G3 iMac video. What gives? Is it the Dual processors?

Any other G4'ers have videos? I don't have the means to make one.

[GnOm]

Originally posted by JoeyA:
Any other G4'ers have videos?

no video, sorry but on my Cube450 it�s somewhere in between the two but closer to the first one. On my Yosemite 400MHz its a bit slower than on the Cube.
Maybe something like this (where 1 is the fast movie, C is my Cube, Y the b&w and 2 the second movie):

1...C...Y......2


cu

[This message has been edited by GnOm (edited 05-17-2001).]

[Norm1985]

Well, wasn't the G4 being tested DP? That could explain why you're getting more similar results to the iMac than the G4.

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E-mail: [email protected]
AIM: Norm1985
ICQ: 34049393

[This message has been edited by Norm1985 (edited 05-17-2001).]

[dfbennett]

To the original Poster: Good God that is amazingly fast! Window resizing on my G4 350 256mb of Ram is what I would call acceptable but if it was as fast as yours I'd be more than satisfied.

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Regards,
Dave

[foobars]

I have a G4/400 Sawtooth and my speed in the finder are probably 85% of the first movie in column view. Icon view is much faster. The Genie effects were the same as far as I could tell. In IE, however, I'd say the original movie is probably twice as fast re-rendering the page. Therein lies the DP difference...

[Lord Kronos]

I've seen OS X on several machines, and I was very surprised to see that on a single-processor G4 OS X was quite slow, barely usable. But it was 4K78 and millions of colors don't help.

I know that X has been greatly optimized since 4K78, even if the Finder is still the same, so maybe it's better now. On my dual-500 resizing a finder window used to take about 150 % of CPU (WM = 100%, Finder = 50%), now it takes about 100 % (50/50) and everything is much faster (besides the Finder...). So, there's hope, for all of us .

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"Sing you fools ! But you got it wrong..."

[ckohler]

Okay, I've made a video. I had to use a PC to digitize it, so its in MPEG format instead of Quicktime. Sorry about that. The video is much longer than Toyin and NTSC's video though, clocking in at around 3 minutes. It shows much more including:

* Launching iTunes and playing song (thoughout entire video)
* Launching IE, browsing the web and resizing its window
* Minimizing and scrolling in IE
* Launching a game emulator and playing a quick game
* Resizing a finder window in column view
* Loading and playing a Quicktime video clip

There are two versions of the video. A small and kinda blurry version (for bandwidth impaired) and a large, clear version for high speed surfers. Let me know how you compair.

cubeinx_sm.mpg - 3.3meg
cubeinx_lg.mpg - 13.6meg

Specs:
Cube 450 (single processor of course)
320mb Ram and Factory 20mb Hard Drive
Factory ATI Rage128 Pro at 1024x768
MacOS X version 10.0.3



[This message has been edited by ckohler (edited 05-18-2001).]

[mindwaves]

These vidoes confirm two things:

1) I need more RAM
2) I need a G4

[OverclockedHomoSapien]

It's a good thing I checked this thread out. To think that I was actually about to go buy a new HD and OS X for my PMG4! Sorry Apple, you lose. I'll be sticking with OS 9.1/9.2 for YEARS unless OS X's GUI is drastically accelerated. I'm shocked...and to think that Apple actually sells this on the open market! It's a disgrace to Apple and to anyone who owns a mac.

I remember when Apple had the highest standards in the industry. No more. Now it's all just about BSing the consumer with smoke and mirrors....I'd like to know how the OS X team can sleep at night--oh, wait, they all have dual processor G4 533s to work on.

Judging by these movies, OS X will be completely unusable on the new iBook. What a shame, that Apple has hung themselves on a rope of their own making.

[GnOm]

Originally posted by OverclockedHomoSapien:
I'll be sticking with OS 9.1/9.2 for YEARS

there�s nothing wrong with that, but it may be even better to give OS X a try and judge by yourself instead judging on some movies. Resizing Windows is maybe not _the_ killer criteria on which to judge an OS.


cu

Originally posted by ckohler:
The video is much longer than Toyin and NTSC's video though, clocking in at around 3 minutes. It shows much more including:

* Launching iTunes and playing song (thoughout entire video)
* Launching IE, browsing the web and resizing its window
* Minimizing and scrolling in IE
* Launching a game emulator and playing a quick game
* Resizing a finder window in column view
* Loading and playing a Quicktime video clip

Nice movie.

It appears Mac OS X is quite pleasant to use on a G4 450 with Rage 128 Pro.

Question 1: Thousands or Millions?

Question 2: Does that usage pattern represent your typical Mac using day?! Surf into MacNN forums, play Neo-Geo, play QuickTime movie trailers... And I thought I knew how to waste time!

[bateman]

two great sentences in this thread.

OverclockedHomoSapien : "I'd like to know how the OS X team can sleep at night--oh, wait, they all have dual processor G4 533s to work on."

and gorgonzola : "I'm going to buy a new machine this summer and I'm having a hard time deciding between the iBook and the T4. If the G4 chip really makes a big difference I'll go Titanium."

for the first one, no way, they must take pills to sleep. macworld new york is in two months..

for the second, gorgonzola has the same problem as me.
i want a notebook. but for os 10 two.

this week-end i will do a movie, the same test, with an iMac G3 400, 384 mo, 18 HD (7200 t/mn)..


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Florence mon amour

[PeteL999]

toyin -- sorry to get off topic but whats that desktop picture??

[Mediaman_12]

What we need in this thread is somone with an LCD display, a digicam & some free time. Shots off a LCD would be much clearer without the banding displayed in the 2 CRT movies.

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[Todd Madson]

Shows that a G4 processor (which I have), additional memory (I have 256, even more might give it a boost) and a large fast hard drive are your best buddies. I don't know why some people are slitting their wrists over this OS - the speed I saw in the big G4 video was about part with what I get on my G4/400/256.

[mumble]

Originally posted by PeteL999:
toyin -- sorry to get off topic but whats that desktop picture??

/System/Library/Screen\ Savers/Forest.saver/Contents/Resources/Images/Forest02.jpg

[Toyin]

chokler great video. Your cube seems to resize windows slightly better than mine. I don't think the difference between 1028 x 764 and 1056 x 792 should make a difference. I wonder if this has anything to do with the Radeon vs Rage drivers. Launching times are much faster on my machine. IE & itunes open in 5-6 bounces.

I feel for the G3 owners. The live resizing really is unacceptable. I hope they add the ability to turn off live resizing in the final.


-PeteL999
The desktop image started as Forrest 02.jpg. I added the sidebar holder and the figure (in the lower left corner) in photoshop. Remember to visualize the contents of the Forest.saver (System/Library/Screen Savers/Forest.saver) control click Forest.saver and select show package contents.

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-Toyin

ToyinFayemi.com

[This message has been edited by Toyin (edited 05-18-2001).]

[griffman]

What we need in this thread is somone with an LCD display, a digicam & some free time. Shots off a LCD would be much clearer without the banding displayed in the 2 CRT movies.

I'll see if I can't do that this weekend - my wife has a 15" LCD display, and I've got the videocam, so I'll just see if I can steal her monitor for a bit. I tried last night with my Sony monitor, but even at 60hz, I had really bad banding...

-rob.

[ckohler]

Underclocked:
My display was set to thousands of colors during the video. Yet, when I set it to millions it performs the same. The Cube is my home computer (I use a PC at work) and I tend to mostly do the things shown in the video.

I also edit websites when I bring my work home with me. This entails remote edit web documents using terminal and create/editing graphics in Photoshop using Classic. I also do a lot of FTPing between my machine and our server farm at work. All of _those_ tasks seemed pretty trivial to me so I decided to only show things in my video which used a considerable amount of processing power such as having an MP3 playing in the background while emulating another computer.

Toyin:
To be completely honest, I think your window resizing is as fast if not a bit faster than mine. I could be wrong, but that's what it looked like to me.

If there's anything one should be able to see in my video is the fact that I can whip right along in OSX very happily. For me, it's fast and will only get faster.



[This message has been edited by ckohler (edited 05-18-2001).]

[dfbennett]

After seeing the cube video, I'm not so disappointed anymore. My window resizing is only slightly slower than the long video on the cube despite 100mhz difference in clock speed and a difference in ram. Looks like my good ol' G4 isn't so bad afterall
G4 350 Sawtooth, ATI Rage 128 Pro AGP, 256mb RAM, Maxtor 30gb 7200rpm HD, 1024x768 Millions

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Regards,
Dave