[Eug Wanker]

Apple still talks about Quartz Extreme and Quartz 2D, but makes no mention of Quartz 2D Extreme on their public Tiger online not-so-technical blackpapers AFAIK. Are they just trying to keep things simple for us? I hope so.

P.S. I still don't know the answer to this... Will my Radeon 9000 or my GeForce2 MX with G4 1 GHz and G4 1.7 GHz respectively support the ripple effect in Dashboard? I know it's a stupid irrelevant question in the greater scheme of things, but I kinda like that ripple effect.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Well considering that it was an option hidden away in some dumb Developer's Application according to the rumor sites, just like resolution independence, it may not have been implemented fully.

[chabig]

Are you sure you're not mixing up Quartz 2D and Quartz Extreme?

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by chabig:
Are you sure you're not mixing up Quartz 2D and Quartz Extreme?

Yes I'm sure. Quartz 2D Extreme was supposed to replace Quartz 2D, and does different work from Quartz Extreme.

[chabig]

I just found this: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...r/886008328631

It sounds very cool! But I'd never heard of it before.

Chris

[Eug Wanker]

This was from WWDC 2004, but they said at the time that it wasn't turned on by default, because of display glitches.



Are the glitches still a problem? Is this turned on in Tiger or not?

[Thinine]

It's in there, but not active on a 12" PowerBook 1.33 w/FX5200Go or a first gen. dual 2 GHz PowerMac w/Radeon 9600. It may be that with all the software improvements they made, they aren't turning it on for the lower end cards that can technically do it, for performance or other reasons. I want to see if it's on by default on a machine with an X800 or 6800U.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Thinine:
It's in there, but not active on a 12" PowerBook 1.33 w/FX5200Go or a first gen. dual 2 GHz PowerMac w/Radeon 9600. It may be that with all the software improvements they made, they aren't turning it on for the lower end cards that can technically do it, for performance or other reasons. I want to see if it's on by default on a machine with an X800 or 6800U.

Hmmm... Very interesting. I would have expected that a Radeon 9600 Pro was more than fast enough.

How do you check? (Not that it matters for me, since I don't have a Power Mac with 9800 Pro or better.)

[Thinine]

The Quartz Debug app will tell you whether it's active.

[sworthy]

Originally posted by Thinine:
The Quartz Debug app will tell you whether it's active.

Damn... even 10.4 isn't fully optimized... stupid debug crap

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Thinine:
It's in there, but not active on a 12" PowerBook 1.33 w/FX5200Go or a first gen. dual 2 GHz PowerMac w/Radeon 9600. It may be that with all the software improvements they made, they aren't turning it on for the lower end cards that can technically do it, for performance or other reasons. I want to see if it's on by default on a machine with an X800 or 6800U.

Did you trying activating it to see what happens? I'm not convinced it would do much with a Go 5200, but maybe with a 9600 Pro...

So... Does anyone here have a 9800, X800, or 6800 to help us out with Quartz Debug and Q2DE?

Quartz 2D Extreme seemed like a potential feature in Tiger that could have had one of the biggest perceivable impacts on the feel of the GUI. In fact, I had thought that it was the main reason for the reports by some that the developer Tiger builds felt much faster, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

[Devin Lane]

Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default no matter what hardware you have.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Devin Lane:
Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default no matter what hardware you have.

Damn. Is it still buggy?

So should we not expect it active by default until 10.5 Lion in 2007?

So... Q2DE in 10.5, and resolution independence and 64-bit GUI API support in 10.6...

PS. Will my non-Shader-2.0-compliant GPU mean I won't get the ripple effect in Dashboard? Just wondering. That's Core Image right? Or is it strictly non-shader-2.0 OpenGL like in Keynote 2?

[xi_hyperon]

Originally posted by Devin Lane:
Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default no matter what hardware you have.

Well, that sucks. Why exactly?

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by xi_hyperon:
Well, that sucks. Why exactly?

I'm no expert, but it's explained in the Ars thread linked above by chabig.

Essentially, with the proper GPU, Quartz 2D Extreme would have given yet another speed boost like Quartz Extreme did to 10.2 Jaguar. (Even with the Quartz Extreme we have now, a lot of the stuff is done on the CPU, whereas with Quartz 2D Extreme, much of that would be pushed off to the GPU.)

However, the GPU hardware requirements are considerably beefier than what Quartz Extreme needed. Quartz 2D Extreme and Core Image both need Shader 2.0 compliant video cards, and a fast one is preferred.

[xi_hyperon]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I'm no expert, but it's explained in the Ars thread linked above by chabig.

Essentially, with the proper GPU, Quartz 2D Extreme would have given yet another speed boost like Quartz Extreme did to 10.2 Jaguar. (Even with the Quartz Extreme we have now, a lot of the stuff is done on the CPU, whereas with Quartz 2D Extreme, much of that would be pushed off to the GPU.)

However, the GPU hardware requirements are considerably beefier than what Quartz Extreme needed. Quartz 2D Extreme and Core Image both need Shader 2.0 compliant video cards, and a fast one is preferred.

But the last post in the thread lists the ATI Radeon 9600 as one that could support it. I have this card, so why not activate it for people who have sufficient GPUs?

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by xi_hyperon:
But the last post in the thread lists the ATI Radeon 9600 as one that could support it. I have this card, so why not activate it for people who have sufficient GPUs?

Well, in that video (see above) back from WWDC 2004, the Apple presenter said it was still buggy (more so on nVidia cards). Maybe it's just not ready for prime time yet, even though it's 10 months later.

He did however seem to suggest that it was abstracted enough so that when turned on, it wouldn't affect the functionality of most apps, except to speed them up.

I'm just guessing of course though.

[Chuckit]

I pretty much expected that Quartz 2D Extreme wouldn't be ready when it was released. That's why they haven't been touting it like they did Quartz Extreme � they knew they weren't far enough along to promise a working feature on release. I imagine Quartz 2D Extreme will probably be added in 10.4.5 or something along those lines.

[wataru]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
64-bit GUI API support in 10.6...

Apparently that will never come because it's actually slower than 32-bit and gives very little, if any, benefit.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by wataru:
Apparently that will never come because it's actually slower than 32-bit and gives very little, if any, benefit.

I'm not a programmer, but some who are have said that it'd be simpler to just keep the GUI in the same process as their 64-bit app. Separating the two out can make the coding much more complicated. I'll stop there though, since I don't know about this stuff first hand.

[wataru]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I'm not a programmer, but some who are have said that it'd be simpler to just keep the GUI in the same process as their 64-bit app. Separating the two out can make the coding much more complicated. I'll stop there though, since I don't know about this stuff first hand.

Here's where I got that.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by Thinine:
It's in there, but not active on a 12" PowerBook 1.33 w/FX5200Go or a first gen. dual 2 GHz PowerMac w/Radeon 9600. It may be that with all the software improvements they made, they aren't turning it on for the lower end cards that can technically do it, for performance or other reasons. I want to see if it's on by default on a machine with an X800 or 6800U.

Which build are you running?

Originally posted by wataru:
Here's where I got that.

Interesting read, but it's of note that the very same post states that both the FCP and Shake teams were pissed off about the lack of full 64-bit support.

[bewebste]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I'm not a programmer, but some who are have said that it'd be simpler to just keep the GUI in the same process as their 64-bit app. Separating the two out can make the coding much more complicated. I'll stop there though, since I don't know about this stuff first hand.

The biggest obstacle to being able to do this is that Apple needs to create separate 64-bit versions of every framework and library that developers want to use from a 64-bit application. This is a rather large amount of work, and in Tiger, only the most basic system libraries have been ported to 64-bit. Thus, for now, writing a 64-bit GUI application isn't possible because Apple hasn't had the time or resources to make a 64-bit version of CoreGraphics, Cocoa, Carbon, etc.

The apps that most benefit from 64-bitness tend to be scientific/number crunching apps anyway (that need to be able to work with > 4GB of RAM at a time), so this is OK for the time being. You can still communicate with 64-bit apps from other processes, so if you really need to display some data, you can write a separate 32-bit GUI and have it fetch data from the 64-bit number crunching process.

I'm sure that eventually everything will get moved over eventually, although it may take a few revisions. But for now, there's no reason to want, say, a 64-bit Safari - it wouldn't boost performance or enable features that aren't achievable in 32-bit.

[Detrius]

The fact that a ship date has been announced does not change the fact that Tiger is NOT available. No Tiger support threads until it ships--This discussion is a blatant violation of NDA.