[muchfresh]

The three things that it will help are not that interesting

-windows will move using less CPU power but resizing will still suck
-transparency will be faster and require less CPU, but transparency largely sucks (I hate transparent title bars on background windows)
-minimize effects will be smoother and require less CPU whoop de doo

rendezvous now that sounds cool! I wonder how hard it will be to get a searchable directory running across the interent ala napster.

[MickS]

Originally posted by muchfresh:
<STRONG>The three things that it will help are not that interesting
</STRONG>

The fourth thing it will help is the shadowing. The windows all have shadows on them, this will be accelerated. This should have a noticeable impact on performance providing the GPU can get the information fast enough.

[ppmax]

resizing windows will not suck--in fact this will probably be the biggest speed gain. the reason is that the gfx chip will compute all the transforms on windows, which are just pieces of geometry.

[dazzla]

Why will window resizing still suck?

[shortcipher]

Originally posted by muchfresh:
<STRONG>The three things that it will help are not that interesting

-windows will move using less CPU power but resizing will still suck
-transparency will be faster and require less CPU, but transparency largely sucks (I hate transparent title bars on background windows)
-minimize effects will be smoother and require less CPU whoop de doo</STRONG>

is this all it will do? really?

what about rendering web pages? will that be speeded up at all? (Im not referring to the parsing of the html, just the drawing-all-the-stuff-on-the-page part).

and what about scrolling in apps other than the Finder?

frankly I dont find Quartz especially slow when it comes to window dragging or dock minimising anyway and I have shadows switched off, so I dont see the benefit, surely it will do more.

[kennethmac2000]

Originally posted by ppmax:
<STRONG>resizing windows will not suck--in fact this will probably be the biggest speed gain. the reason is that the gfx chip will compute all the transforms on windows, which are just pieces of geometry.</STRONG>

Even if the window contents have to be re-rendered by the application!? I don't think so.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by shortcipher:
<STRONG>

is this all it will do? really?

what about rendering web pages? will that be speeded up at all? (Im not referring to the parsing of the html, just the drawing-all-the-stuff-on-the-page part).

and what about scrolling in apps other than the Finder?
</STRONG>

Webpage drawing/rendering is trivial for Quartz...I don't mean to insult your intelligence but Quartz Extreme will not make rendering any faster. With Classic Quartz (or whatever you wanna call the current Quartz) you can pretty much drag a large window without any choppiness (that's a lot of redrawing per second...this includes double-buffering). If Quartz can handle that, why would it have a hard time displaying static pictures in a webpage?

It's up to the people the authors of the rendering engine to optimize it. It has nothing to do with Quartz.

Scrolling in apps other than the Finder should be accelerated too.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by kennethmac2000:
<STRONG>

Even if the window contents have to be re-rendered by the application!? I don't think so.</STRONG>

Yeah, I too am wondering how apps such as OmniWeb (which has to dynamically change the size of tables and other HTML objects). My guess is it will benefit a little since the CPU is going to be a little more free to do these calculations while the window redrawing itself will be handled by the GPU.

[Target Practice]

Originally posted by kennethmac2000:
<STRONG>

Even if the window contents have to be re-rendered by the application!? I don't think so.</STRONG>

My understanding is that Quartz will still render the contents of windows (e.g. fonts, page layout, etc.) and that OpenGL will render the GUI 'wrapper' around the window contents (e.g. window widgets, shadows, transparency, etc.)

Window resizing seems to suck because most applications choose to dynamically recalculate and redraw the window contents repeatedly while the user adjusts the window size. This means the CPU (not the graphics card) has to recalculate line breaks, HTML, etc. I assume that Quark Extreme will speed things up by offloading the things that OpenGL can handle, thereby reducing the load on the CPU. These functions are what the Quartz Compositor handles currently.

That's my guess, am I correct?

[Sophus]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>

Yeah, I too am wondering how apps such as OmniWeb (which has to dynamically change the size of tables and other HTML objects). My guess is it will benefit a little since the CPU is going to be a little more free to do these calculations while the window redrawing itself will be handled by the GPU.</STRONG>

I believe that is correct. It will mean a lot to me and my measly 450mhz Cube. The whole system will get a speedboost out of this. It is very exciting indeed.

Sophus

[muchfresh]

OpenGL can help with Translation, Transformation and compositing. I just think that Aqua already does a fine job at that.

From Apple

Jaguar dramatically improves the performance of Mac OS X with Quartz Extreme. Jaguar lets Quartz offload compositing tasks to a supported* video card, using OpenGL to accelerate the drawing and compositing of graphics. As with the benefits 3D games get from a video co-processor, the main CPU chip(s) can then focus on application-specific needs.
That means your shadows will drop quickly, your genies will appear slicker and your transparencies will layer faster � and Mac OS X can do more processing in the background while you move the foreground.

No where do they suggest that resizing will be faster. My complaint and most people's complaint about aqua was the slow live resizing. Windows rocks at resizing windows.

On my 500 Mhz G3 powerbook I already get great scrolling speed and windows can be dragged around quickly. Minimizing windows can be slow and chunky sometimes, but I minimize very rarely. But I adjust window sizes constantly.

Compositing should also see a speed increase but compositing is only sparingly used (thank god). So I don't think this will help much in perceived performance gains.

Windows are already double buffered.

Who knows why (I certainly don't) the GUI is slow and unresponsive but I don't think QE will help much. Other things like recompiling with GCC 3 and more pervasive threading in the finder will likely help though. Hopefully they have spent some time optimizing GUI functions so that Jaguar overall feels 'snappier'

I for one am more concerned with snappiness than overall raw computational power.

[ppmax]

any graphics card that does hardware t&l should speed up window resizing. think of the corner of a window as a vertex. any transform on that vertex would be handled by the gfx hardware.

the things that gfx cards dont do well is handle big texmaps. its amazing apple only requires 32 megs of ram on the card.

[bob_hearn]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>

Webpage drawing/rendering is trivial for Quartz...I don't mean to insult your intelligence but Quartz Extreme will not make rendering any faster. With Classic Quartz (or whatever you wanna call the current Quartz) you can pretty much drag a large window without any choppiness (that's a lot of redrawing per second...this includes double-buffering). If Quartz can handle that, why would it have a hard time displaying static pictures in a webpage?
</STRONG>

I have to disagree. Let me tell you, Quartz is godawful slow, even for basic graphics such as web page contents. I've switched from QuickDraw to Quartz on all my development, and though the precision and spiffiness are nice, the speed is intolerable. (If it weren't for the upcoming Quartz Extreme, I'd switch back.) Even when you turn off antialasing, alpha-channel, etc., the basic drawing operations are much slower than QuickDraw , presumably because the code is generalized, and not optimized for "ugly" (i.e. non-composited) graphics. No doubt the double-buffering slows things down as well, but I've always double-buffered my QuickDraw, and it's snappy. (The Quartz docs don't make it at all easy to know when you're using the double-buffering efficiently, however.)

My impression is that Quartz Extreme will use the gpu for ALL drawing, on supported hardware. Didn't Steve say that "everything will go through OpenGL"? This should make a HUGE difference, for any kind of graphical operation.

You mention that window dragging is fast - bitblts are easy to optimize. OTOH, the entire window contents are continually redrawn during resizing. It may be "simple graphics", but it's still entirely different. Cocoa makes this worse; without a lot of effort on the developer's part, stuff is redrawn more times than it needs to be.

<STRONG>

It's up to the people the authors of the rendering engine to optimize it. It has nothing to do with Quartz.

</STRONG>

Quartz IS the rendering engine. Throwing it in hardware is one effective way of optimizing it.


Bob Hearn

[clebin]

Anything that the CPU really should be doing while it's spending its resources on a PDF-based graphics engine will be better too, or atleast more predictable.

I suppose a lot has happened since the days our OS ran on 680x0s, but it was reknowned for being a fast, smooth OS back then. How much do I want Quartz Extreme to bring us some of that?

Chris

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by bob_hearn:
<STRONG>

Quartz IS the rendering engine. Throwing it in hardware is one effective way of optimizing it.</STRONG>

He was talking about the HTML rendering engine, which most definitely is NOT Quartz but part of the web browser used.

[shortcipher]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
<STRONG>

It's up to the people the authors of the rendering engine to optimize it. It has nothing to do with Quartz.

Scrolling in apps other than the Finder should be accelerated too.</STRONG>

actually thats was pretty much what I thought, what I dont understand is why it seems impossible for any Web browser developers on OSX to make a browser that can resize windows at least as fast as OSX can resize an empty window. Just try resizing a browser window with one of these forum pages in it in, say, Omniweb - ugh! almost impossible!, try the same thing with an empty window and its almost real time.

We know that this technology is possible, look at how fast IE on Windows can resize & reflow a web page.

how does it do this?

whay cant any OSX browser do this? Its not Quartz, so what is it?

[bob_hearn]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
<STRONG>

He was talking about the HTML rendering engine, which most definitely is NOT Quartz but part of the web browser used.</STRONG>

Ah, yes, that makes sense. Cocoa does make it easy to wind up redrawing a lot more than you need to; a smarter HTML renderer could alleviate that.

Still, it all bottoms out with Quartz, and no amount of optimization of the number of calls made to Quartz will change the fact that each call is slower than its QuickDraw counterpart. It seems as though Quartz Extreme should give even web browsers an across-the-board speedup.


Bob Hearn

[bob_hearn]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
<STRONG>

He was talking about the HTML rendering engine, which most definitely is NOT Quartz but part of the web browser used.</STRONG>

Ah, yes, that makes sense. Cocoa does make it easy to wind up redrawing a lot more than you need to; a smarter HTML renderer could alleviate that.

Still, it all bottoms out with Quartz, and no amount of optimization of the number of calls made to Quartz will change the fact that each call is slower than its QuickDraw counterpart. It seems as though Quartz Extreme should give even web browsers an across-the-board speedup.


Bob Hearn

[Xeo]

Eliminating duplicate threads. Please use the following thread for Quartz Extreme discussion.

Quartz Extreme with only 16MB!!