The short answer on Quartz Extreme on Older Macs (especially Laptops).
The ATI Rage card are why there is no QE on an older Mac. Not because it is impossible, but because the amount of benefit you would see from having QE on a Rage card (with any amount of memory) is negligable.
Why? Because the Rage card can only do 2d stuff in power of two. What does that mean? If you have a window that is say, 320x240, the rage card would render out the entire 320x320 are that the window is sitting in. Inefficient to say the least and while it might offload some of the processor load and make Photoshop run a smidge faster, the interface (Aqua) would remain just as slow, if not be slower, which is the issue that QE was designed to alleviate in the first place.
Keeping in mind that despite this power of 2 BS, the Rage card was a good one at the time. It's just that the Radeon was a huge step forward.
So why isn't there quartz extreme on older macs? Because in almost every case, it just wouldn't help.
You might also ask "Why doesn't QE become enabled automagically when I put a Radeon 7000 into my PCI PowerMac?" I don't know. That you would have to talk to Apple about. It's probably something to do with the fact that a 33Mhz PCI bus will become saturated quite quickly by the amount of data going back and forth, more so than an AGP slot, but really you would have to ask Apple about it to be sure.
OS X and the steps forward
OS 10.0.x, as far as I am concerned, was Public Beta 2, they just decided that they couldn't afford to not be charging for it anymore. If you were disappointed with OS 10.0, well sorry but all you had to do was go to their website to find out that there was No DVD playback (and all the other stuff it was missing).
And while Apple did begin including OS X with new Macs after 10.0 was released, they hadn't began installing it, and once they did it wasn't the default OS. It wasn't even the default OS until 3 (or was it 4?) months after 10.1 was released (for free to owners of 10.0) which added all the missing functionality (and I mean the major stuff, don't bring up all the minutiae liek draggable edges because as handy as they may be, they are by no means a huge feature, nor a reason to choose one OS over another).
OS X does tend to run slowly on older machines, but there are a multitude of reasons for this. The easiest one to rectify is RAM, of which many old machines had half or a quarter of what OS X requires (which is 128, despite all the arguments that are going to be lobbed at me). Other factors include slow slow system bus, small slow hard drives, and also slow slow ram. The fact is that despite how much zipper an iMac 333 may feel in OS 9, it is still a slow ass machine.
For a comparison, try running Windows XP on a P2 200 with 32 megs of RAM and a small hard drive. Sure, it runs, but it doesn't feel as fast as it did when you bought it new with the brand new Win98 (first edition!).
The biggest problem with the OS transition for existing Mac users is that we have not really had to upgrade in the past. The requirements for OS 9 are not really that much steeper than 8.6, and 8.6 is not really that much more than 8.1, at least compared to the jump in requirements from 9 to X. We aren't used to having to upgrade and so it comes as a shock that we should have to.
One of the biggest complaints I hear about OS X is that it is slower. And maybe Aqua is slower, maybe it doesn't feel as zippy as OS 9 and Platinum did. But because of all the other advances (especially the stability, SMP and everything else that lets me work well in more than on App at a time) *I* work faster and *I* work better, and that more than makes up the difference.
Just my 2 bits.
--PB
[ May 15, 2003, 03:47 AM: Message edited by: PosterBoy ]
