[muchfresh]

CarbonEvents is the event foundation of OSX. Cocoa events are built on CarbonEvents

[Millennium]

Oh, brother...

Look. Quartz is only one type of graphics layer in OSX. Currently, it can't be accelerated by conventional cards. QuickTime and OpenGL, however, can still be accelerated. This is what a lot of us with Rage Pro cards are asking for; while OpenGL wouldn't get a huge boost from drivers, QuickTime would.

Second, Carbon Events isn't the problem. And it's not the foundation of the events system or multitasking or anything like that; it's just an interface to Mach's own message-passing methods. So is Cocoa's model.

What the problem is, is a lack of CarbonEvents support in apps. Even the Finder can't support it at the moment, because it's tied to PowerPlant, which doesn't support it. Using the old system model is possible in OSX, but it's Not A Good Thing and is only intended for quick-and-dirty ports as a transitional phase while the Carbon Events port (or, preferably, Cocoa rewrite) is finished.

[rothomp3]

To reiterate: CarbonEvents are not the core of anything in Mac OS X. The core "event" system is Mach messages and Mach threads. Pthreads are built on Mach threads, and Cocoa NSThread is built on that. Carbon is built on Mach threads, too. CarbonEvents are built on Mach. Some of Cocoa is implemented in Carbon calls, but CarbonEvents is an unrelated phenomenon to Cocoa. The "problem" (such as it is) is that there are a lot of large latencies to be dealt with in Mach and thd BSD subsystem. Local communication latency is terrible, for instance, and the fork/exec times need serious work. Darwin people are working on it, and though I don't know for sure, chances are it's already vastly improved in the latest builds of xnu. There's certainly something they're wanting to keep secret in there, there hasn't been a push to public CVS for several weeks... and the public bug database hasn't been updated, either. These both point, in my mind, to something very big on the horizon, something someone (Steve?) has declared "secret." I think we'll see all this go public at WWDC. Whether a new build of Mac OS X will be released then I have no way of knowing. But it'll be a big deal to people following Darwin, of that I'm sure.

[snodman]

Quote:
"There is no way that Apple is going to add another GPU - they already have ATi's on everything when the GPU is on the motherboard. The very notion that they're going to come out with some custom graphics card is ridiculous. Do you think Apple could produce a proprietary GPU (read: small market, no economies of scale) and have it compete with the price-performance of ATi and nVidia?"

Why did Apple buy Raycer since Apple was in bed with ATI and were getting into bed with Nvidia? NOT to duplicate the video board makers' efforts, but to enhance them. The only thing that makes sense for Apple to do with Raycer is to build a small chip into their motherboards that hands off OS X 2D (Quartz) acceleration from the main CPU. You would still need a video card (or an integrated video chipset in the case of a laptop or iMac). Remember, both ATI cards and Nvidia cards are not doing ANYTHING to accelerate Quartz.

[Oswald Defense Lawyer]

Over time I suspect we'll see GPUs that do more of what Quartz needs

I'm sure we will... http://private.apple.com/cgi-bin/t3....f?_req=1621195

[JB72]

One benefit Apple would see from putting their own Quartz accel chip on the motherboard is that they would be able to have an advantage over other PPC systems running OS X, should they become available in the future (IBM.)

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JB71.34.1b

Dock Perverts still rule OK?

[gorgonzola]

For the person who asked about Quartz vs OpenGL & QuickTime:

Yes, absolutely, OpenGL and QuickTime performance can be much improved through existing graphics cards. An example: let's say you have a G4/733 with a GB of RAM and a GF3. You have OS 9 and OS X on this machine. You have Halo installed under OS 9 and under OS X. OS X's performance (in raw FPS) would likely be better than OS 9's, because the OpenGL implementation in OS X is extremely good and highly optimized, and OpenGL can be accelerated through current mechanisms (GF3 is as good as it gets for normal people, though). It's the same story with QuickTime.

So things like games should run very well on Mac OS X, assuming the app is written well and you have the proper hardware to support the game (and there are drivers etc for your hardware, of course). That's exactly what the Rage Pro people have been asking for (as someone said) -- we're not going to get a big boost in window resizing, but at least we'll be able to run the screensavers.

It's been covered before, so I don't want to get into the nitty-gritties, but the main point is that Quartz is a completely different kind of graphics layer than QuickDraw (what OS 9 uses), and the problem is that current accelerator cards can't accelerate that kind of calculation. The reason Apple is doing heavy optimization for G4 is simply because there are a lot of vector calculations involved in Quartz, and the AltiVec unit on the G4 is basically a 128-bit unit that performs vector calculations. This is the main reason why OS X runs faster on a G4 than a G3, and this gap will increase as more AltiVec optimizations take place.

Quartz simply cannot be accelerated like QuickDraw can. The question of whether Quartz is fast or not is actually a very complicated one, depending on how you define Quartz (because there's no such thing as "Quartz" per se -- to the system, it's just CoreGraphics Services and CoreGraphics Rendering).

So I'll reiterate my previous point: OS X will never be as fast as OS 9 on the same hardware, but once hardware configs improve, as they will over the next year or two, and OS X matures, this OS will not seem so slow anymore; not at all, in fact.

It is simply foolish to think that Quartz is the only area of Mac OS X where significant optimizations (and thus significant speed increases) can be made. You want to know a serious problem that Apple is trying to fix -- one that will boost speed? The Mach scheduler cannot interpret priority information. Normally, renicing the Finder to a very high nice level would give it more CPU time, and thus speed it up; however, the nice/renice commands are useless, as the Mach scheduler is currently just throwing away all this information (since all this process management is done by Mach). Once nice/renice work, we will have much greater control over which apps should get how much CPU power, and this will really help perceived speed as well as actual speed.

HTH,
gzl

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[Toyin]

So I'll reiterate my previous point: OS X will never be as fast as OS 9 on the same hardware, but once hardware configs improve, as they will over the next year or two, and OS X matures, this OS will not seem so slow anymore; not at all, in fact.

Personally, I'm tired of hearing this statement. OSX may never be faster than OS9 on a G3 machine. Check out the OSX vs OS9 multitasking thread. With a single 733 OSX was faster than OS9. With my dual G4, operations were almost 2x faster than OS9.

Graphics in OS X are faster since the 10.02 update. Menus appear instantly and moving windows is silky smooth. Window resizing (which is obviously very different in OS9 and OSX) is pretty fast and as of late IE window resizes are as fast as the preview app on my machine.



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-Toyin

ToyinFayemi.com

[aaroncsmith]

Originally posted by muchfresh:

**Quartz is not the problem**

OK now look at the facts
1) window dragging, fast
2) scrolling, fast
3) Stickies window resizing, fast
4) dragging transparent terminal window, fast
5) Flash animations, no problems

Repeat after me: Quartz is PART of the problem. Quartz is part of the problem.


1) This is GPU accelerated. This is one of the ONLY graphics-related things that is fast in OSX. This does not show the speed of Quartz, it shows the speed of your ATI card. The only thing that Quartz is touching is the drop shadow, which will eventually bog down the dragging on large windows and choke all other processes on the computer.

2) Scrolling is sure as hell not fast in my opinion. In fact, this is one of the major things that gives an impression of sluggishness. The content lags considerably behind the scroll thumb, which itself lags considerably behind the mouse pointer. That is not what I would call fast. Go scroll a document under ANY version of windows to see what "fast scrolling" means.

3) Window resizing does not seem to really be a Quartz issue. However, you will notice that as you drag a window bigger and bigger, it starts to get choppy at the bigger sizes, even though there is no content to reflow. THAT is Quartz gagging on the drop shadow calculations, which will eventually starve all other processes on your system on big windows.

4) Yes, it is acceptable, but MUCH more choppy than opaque dragging. Quartz is gagging on the transparency. It will eventually starve all other processes on your system for big windows.


5) What is this supposed to prove? All quartz is doing here is blasting pixels to the screen based on already calculated data. It is like a quicktime movie, which only talks to Quartz for the last step before blitting to the screen.

I agree that there are many other things in OS X that could use improvement (including event handling), but Quartz is a big one. Slow scrolling, menu sluggishness, CPU choking on window drags are ALL a direct result of Quartz being in large part unaided by the GPU.

[Group51]

Thanks Gorgonzola, that's all I was asking. I don't really care if Quartz is choking on drawing the surround to a QT movie, if the movie itself is accelerated. I have read so many reason why the Finder is slow, that there must be lots of ways to speed it up *other than* Quartz.

[Ken_F2]

Why did Apple buy Raycer since Apple was in bed with ATI and were getting into bed with Nvidia? NOT to duplicate the video board makers' efforts, but to enhance them.

Most of the Raycer people (75% ?) are now working at nVidia, not Apple. The least talented of those that could not get a job at nVidia are working at Apple, but not in anything graphics related.

[gorgonzola]

Originally posted by Toyin:
Personally, I'm tired of hearing this statement. OSX may never be faster than OS9 on a G3 machine. Check out the OSX vs OS9 multitasking thread. With a single 733 OSX was faster than OS9. With my dual G4, operations were almost 2x faster than OS9.

Point taken, but the fact is, on machines with RageIIc/Rage Pro cards, OS X will never be as fast. On high-end G4's it's a different story, as you say, but I was talking more about older, crappier machines (like the one I'm using right now ).

I made the assumption that the people unsatisfied with X's speed are the people who don't have G4/733 or DP G4's.

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