Today I downloaded BoingX (http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sa...BoingX.htm) from ADC. I've been drooling over the fact that QuartzExtreme can do this since the Jaguar demo at SIGGRAPH 2002 (http://www.opengl.org/developers/code/fe..._apple.pdf) and figured I'd see how the code works even though it wouldn't run on my ATI Rage 128 Pro. And, man, was I happily surprised!

Now, before turning off the background image (by pressing 't') it crawls, but once I do so it happily bounces around my desktop!

Am I correct in guessing that part of the problem is that it's not a power-of-two view port until it switches off the background and that that means QuartzExtreme in-fact can kick in in power-of-two situations on these cards? Obviously the Jaguar window manager does not try to take advantage of QuartzExtreme for cards with less than 32MB VRAM (pre-Radeon cards), but aparently it can still be taken advantage of (sort of) on atleast the ATI Rage 128 Pro.

I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this (and have others with ATI Rage 128 Pro's test it out... and the ATI Rage 128 Mobility too, please).

The requirements for Quartz Extreme are:

1) Rectangle Textures
2) 16 megs VRAM
3) 2x AGP

32 megs VRAM and 4x AGP are preferred but not required.

The Rage 128 fails #1.

As for applications, unless they specifically look for the rectangle texture extension (or other extensions not supported on older cards), there is no reason they won't run without Quartz Extreme. They'll just run slower.

Funny, yesterday I was digging in XLR8 your Mac site for info on the Radeon card Matt sent me. I cam across some info on getting QE to run on PCI cards. (ie hack) So, you might want to poke around there.

The Rage 128 actually does support some limited functionality of rectangle textures (they can only be drawn as screen-aligned quads, and some other restrictions).

The window manager transparency stuff I think doesn't require QE, I think it's just dog-slow if you don't have it

That's the thing, it isn't slow at all. I was surprised.

It's incredibly slow when the view is rendering in a rectangle (transparency is never turned off, it just draws in a background until you press 't'), but once you turn off the background drawing (it fades out) the view it changed to a square texture and it flies: Bouncing the Amiga logo around my desktop, under the dock, over a few windows, under another... it's amazing.

Looks like QuartzExtreme will kick in as long as it's a square texture (and most likely only if it's a power-of-two). I always thought QuartzExtreme was a take-it-or-leave-it technology, but aparently it will accelerate where it can on cards that almost meet the requirements.

Quote:arekkusu wrote:
The requirements for Quartz Extreme are:

1) Rectangle Textures
2) 16 megs VRAM
3) 2x AGP

32 megs VRAM and 4x AGP are preferred but not required.

Sorry, for some reason I was thinking 32MB VRAM was the minimum.