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MAC365 · Jul 14, 2004, 06:11 PM

The cube turning effect when switching users in Panther apparently requires Quartz Extreme which in turn requires a graphics card with at least 16MB VRAM.

My Power Mac G4 466Mhz meets the minimum specifications but does not display the cube effect. Is there any way of 'turning on' Quartz Extreme' as it does not seem to be working.

The card is a 'Rage 128Pro' (16MB) according to system profile.

gorickey · Jul 14, 2004, 06:16 PM

Answer.

chabig · Jul 14, 2004, 06:24 PM

Your video card has the RAM, but I don't think it supports Quartz Extreme (there's more to it than just RAM). Here are two sources that point out the Rage 128 cards as being incapable of doing QE:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/...sx-10.2-8.html
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8979

However, feel free to download Quartz Extreme Check which will tell you whether QE is working or not. If it's not, then there is probably nothing you can do with an unsupported video card.

Chris

bmedina · Jul 14, 2004, 07:37 PM

Does anyone know how to disable the cube effect on machines that support it? Preferably without changing display depths/resolutions on different account.

gorickey · Jul 14, 2004, 07:40 PM

Originally posted by bmedina:
Does anyone know how to disable the cube effect on machines that support it? Preferably without changing display depths/resolutions on different account.

Just out of curiosity...why?

chabig · Jul 14, 2004, 08:00 PM

I think it would be neat if the transition effect were user selectable. Keynote already has a lot of nice transitions. Wouldn't it be neat if you could choose from among them? Perhaps Tiger...

Chris

bmedina · Jul 15, 2004, 01:29 AM

Originally posted by gorickey:
Just out of curiosity...why?

It's faster. The old G3 iMac at work switches users faster than my DP867 G4.

ApeInTheShell · Jul 16, 2004, 12:40 PM

Turn off fast user switching and enable list of users. It is the old way of logging in but it will save you the cube effect.

tooki · Jul 16, 2004, 12:59 PM

Originally posted by MAC365:
The cube turning effect when switching users in Panther apparently requires Quartz Extreme which in turn requires a graphics card with at least 16MB VRAM.

My Power Mac G4 466Mhz meets the minimum specifications but does not display the cube effect. Is there any way of 'turning on' Quartz Extreme' as it does not seem to be working.

The card is a 'Rage 128Pro' (16MB) according to system profile.

I'll repeat what has been said zillions of times since Jaguar introduced Quartz Extreme:

Ignore the VRAM number. Totally.

Quartz Extreme REQUIRES an nVidia card or an ATI Radeon card.

There is nothing you can do to change this -- earlier cards do not support some functions that are absolutely, immutably required by Quartz Extreme.

I wish Apple had never mentioned the minimum VRAM requirement, because people seem to latch onto THAT as the defining characteristic, rather than the nVidia or Radeon requirement. ALL nVidia and Radeon models have sufficient VRAM to run Quartz Extreme.

Quartz Extreme officially requires the card to be on AGP, though it can be coerced onto working on a PCI card as well. But overall system performance is not improved in the latter case, because Quartz Extreme can end up saturating the PCI bus, thus slowing down other things that need to happen.

tooki

goose · Jul 16, 2004, 04:56 PM

Originally posted by ApeInTheShell:
Turn off fast user switching and enable list of users. It is the old way of logging in but it will save you the cube effect.

I think then it would require you to logout and then login as the other user which would be slower than the cube effect. Plus you'll close all your currently running apps.