[macmike42]

Many people, myself included, have always recommended reducing the number of colors from millions to thousands in order to gain a substantial speed increase. In my previous experiences with OS X, this has always held true. I'm not sure when it changed for me, but this most certainly is not the case anymore, at least not on my setup.

I switched to millions a little while ago to do some Photoshop work, and suddenly, every window manager operation seemed to have increased in performance by at least 150% (ie not quite doubled, but noticeably faster).

I have tested this extensively, and it seems to hold true just about everywhere, even after several reboots. Mozilla, in particular, used to slow to an absolute crawl when I used millions, but was in fact faster this time. I have not done any of the following in at least a month: defragged, repaired, or check permissions on my hard drive, updated my prebinding, used any theme
other than Aqua, installed a .pkg-based installer, or rebooted (today excluded).

My graphics-related stuff is as follows:

Machine: Beige G3/300
RAM: 384 MB
OS: 10.2.1
Card: ATI Rage Orion (Rage 128/16MB)
Drivers: Latest October ATI drivers

Can anyone else confirm this, is my machine just blessed for the weekend, have I slowed down by 50% today, or is this for real?

PS. Oh wow! You know that Photoshop 7 palette-redraw-on-switch-to-forground slowdown? The amount of time it takes is now down to less than a second, before it was damn near 4 seconds. Oooh that makes me all giddy! Now I won't loose my train of thought before PS is ready for me! (I'm a recovering stoner, thank you)

[vasu]

That's very intersting indeed. Under Jaguar, Quartz Extreme only runs when the computer is in Millions of Colors mode. So going to Thousands would slow it down more than Millions.

However, your computer isn't supported by Quartz Extreme, so that shouldn't affect you..

-vasu

[Millennium]

Theoretically, this is possible.

It depends on how the app is written. If an app is specifically optimized for Millions of colors (something which isn't even possible for all but the most graphics-intensive apps), then scaling the colors back to Thousands can actually take more time than rendering it in Millions. But very few apps can actually be written in that way.

It's possible that Quartz is Millions-optimized at this point. I'm not sure it could be done, but I suppose it's possible.

[macmike42]

Just a thought, to build on that...

Even in the Public Beta, if I took a screen shot (of anything window manger-related) in thousands and zoomed in on it, everything was dithered (viewing in thousands or millions). Dithering almost certainly takes CPU or GPU time. Strange that it might take more .?PU time now than in 10.1, or even 10.2.0?.

Geez. I can't believe I'm using regex in my posts. They better be correct.

[UNTeMac]

I have a Rev. D iMac and I've been using Thousands for quite awhile. I just switched to millions and I forgot how pretty that is. Everything seems brighter for some reason. As for speed, the operations seem a little sped up but my framerates for things like the scale and genie effects are worse. I dunno which I like better.

[alex_kac]

It may just be that the drivers are now optimized only for 32-bit color (24-bit real with 8-bit alpha).