[macmike42]

I just plopped a Radeon 7000 32MB in my beige G3/300, and figured I would see what this Quartz extreme buzz was all about. I upgraded from a Rage Orion 16MB. Long story short: not much on a 33 MHz PCI bus (pretty sure that's what's in a rev a beige).

It works as advertised, but really puts a strain on the poor PCI bus and my underpowered CPU. Transparent windows are, of course, just as fast as opaque ones, which is kinda cool, but useless. Window resizing is a bit faster than with the Orion (see below). Sheets and the window movements they sometimes create are *way* smoother. Most QuickTime video formats get all garbled when rendered "extreme" (dragging a window over them, made transparent, or when drawing the first frame). Interestingly, Sorenson and DivX/3ivX work prefectly when rendered "extreme", most other codecs do not. The genie effect is much improved, but seems to take an extra few milliseconds to "prepare". Desktop screensavers still use way to much CPU power. Cross-fading desktop pictures are certainly the nicest, most usable feature. Scrolling actually got noticably worse compared to the Orion, and would stutter badly under any kind of load. Games, interestingly, seemed totally unaffected by Quartz Extreme. Q3 ran at some ridiculous frame rate, UT seemed a bit faster than under the Orion, but still needs a faster CPU than I have under X. Finally, the worst part: I have an OrangeLink FireWire/USB card, and the FireWire bus refuses to even register itself when Quartz Extreme is turned on!

So I turned Quartz Extreme off and decided to get back to work. Surprise! Window resizing is now easily twice as fast as with the Rage Orion. Scrolling sees a much larger improvement, even under heavy load (the Orion would lose it under heavy load). Clearly I no longer have the few eye-candy benefits of Quartz Extreme, but every *basic* operation is way faster without it. This is undoubtedly the reason Apple enables it for AGP machines only.

I just figured I would share my experiences, and see if anyone else has had similar/contrasting experiences with this totally cool, totally useless technology. Is it really that much more efficient with an AGP bus? I've seen what this Radeon card can do at 33 MHz with a 300 MHz CPU, it's *not* a bottleneck in the card.

BTW, for reference, I am running the standard 10.2.3 drivers (not ATI's retail drivers), and I have not run the flash ROM upgrade available for my card (heard too many horror stories).

[Gul Banana]

With an AGP bus and a good video card, it is actually a good thing - I upgraded from a Rage 128 Pro to a Radeon 8500, resulting in fairly dramatic system speedups in 10.2, most of which went away when I deliberately turned off QE for testing. Window scrolling and resizing is faster, transparency is as smooth as something very smooth, and most notably, compositing of animation is quite amazing. Framerates in Warcraft III multiplayer still suck, due to it having a 400 MHz processor QE doesn't claim to affect games, anyway.