We received many letters in response to Enabling Quartz Extreme on Pismo in last
Monday's mailbag column.
Pismo Too Old for Quartz Extreme
From Andrew Main
Charles,
PCI Extreme does look interesting, but probably not for our
"Pismo" PowerBooks. According
to the documentation, "The hack PCI Extreme! performs will not
allow older cards, such as the Rage II, Rage 128 Pro, Nexus, or any
Voodoo or Nvidia cards to utilize Quartz Extreme. No Radeon, no
acceleration. That is the bottom line."
The "Pismo" PB has the Rage 128 card. According to MacTracker,
the earliest PowerBook with a Radeon card is the second-generation Power Mac G4 (Gigabit
Ethernet), and the earliest iBook is the 16 VRAM (Spring 2002), which came at
600 & 700 MHz.
It looks like this hack might cause serious problems if it
doesn't work, so I'd be very careful trying it out.
Andrew Main
Hi Andrew,
I guess the reliable ol' "if it seems to good to be true, it
probably is" axiom applies in this instance.
The bottom line, as you say, would be Radeon support.
Dan has posted an update in the mailbag entry to that
effect.
Charles
PCI Extreme! Stops Pismo on Startup
From Matt
Charles,
I attempted to run this program on my Pismo under 10.4.1. Upon
restart, the boot process stops at the blue screen. To resolve, I
booted up in safe mode and disabled the patch. Just thought I'd
give you a heads-up!
Matt Fiechtner
P.S. The time has finally come. I have put my tricked-out Pismo
up for sale on eBay. :( Though, it might give you a good
idea what the going market value is, should you decide to unload
yours - god forbid! ;)
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the information. I was a bit apprehensive about
something like that. I did download the software, but I had not
tried it yet - and now will not.
I agree that the end is in sight for the Pismo as a front-line
production machine. Performance with Tiger is tolerable but
mediocre, and things will only go downhill from here, athough if
the rumored video upgrade solution materializes, it would help
stave off the inevitable for a while longer.
I will be hanging on to my Pismo even after my next system
upgrade. it will just get shunted down the line to less demanding
sorts of duty. Good luck selling yours.
Charles
Re: PCI Extreme! Stops Pismo on Startup
From Matt
Wow I never heard about the possible video upgrade - it's too
late now for me I suppose, but could you pass along to me the
details of the rumor?
Glad to hear you're sticking by your Pismo. I wrote in my eBay
description that selling it almost felt like I was betraying an old
friend. It's not that I am no longer happy with its performance,
it's just that I will soon be needing a portable that can run iDVD
- and it appears that it requires a 1 GHz G4 or greater to
install/run.
Take care,
Matt
Hi Matt,
All I have on the video upgrade is second-hand. It sounds
plausible, but I'll not say more until I have some
confirmation.
Charles
Quartz Slow on Pismo
From Jim Strickland
PCI Extreme! does not work on Pismo. It causes the
computer to hang at either login or startup, depending on your
luck. It's not completely dead, since the screen still goes in and
out of backlight power saving mode, but it's not usable.
If you've already tried this, you can boot your Pismo into safe
mode by holding down the shift key after the tone. It will come up
in safe mode, whereon you can use PCI Extreme! to switch Quartz
Extreme back into AGP mode, reboot, and things return to normal.
This is all under 10.4.1.
I do have a question for you. I've noticed Quartz is quite slow
with the 10.4 upgrade, and I'm wondering if a G4 CPU upgrade will
speed this up - I'm currently getting the double whammy of no
Quartz Extreme and no Altivec.
Anyway, thanks.
-Jim
Hi Jim,
My Pismo with the 550 MHz G4 upgrade is definitely slower
running OS X 10.4.1 that it was with any of the Panther
versions. In OS X 10.3 the support for Altivec seemed to
cancel out the clock speed advantage that my 700 MHz G3 iBook
enjoys along with barely support for Quartz Extreme thanks
to its Radeon 7500 graphics and 16 MB of video RAM.
With Tiger, the equation is reversed. The iBook seems to run
about as fast with Tiger as it did in OS X 10.3.9, and it is
now faster than the upgraded Pismo.
So to answer your question, I don't think that a G4 processor
upgrade is much of a solution for Tiger's video support demands as
long as we're stuck with a RAGE 128 video card and 8 MB of
VRAM.
Charles
Quartz Extreme Not Possible on Pismo
From Luca Rescigno
I can't see how it's possible to run Quartz Extreme on a Pismo.
There's a very good technical reason for why it can't be done,
right here:
http://www.projectomega.org/article.php?lg=en&php=quartzextreme&p=1
The explanation is a ways down. Basically, QE treats the screen
as a polygon and windows as textures on that polygon. The Rage
series of video cards can't handle textures that aren't in a
power-of-2 size, so unless the window is exactly 2048 or 4096 or
65,536 pixels in size (or some other power of two), the Rage video
card won't actually be doing any work.
My guess is that somehow the user managed to get PCI Extreme! to
trick OS X into thinking Quartz Extreme was enabled, thus
displaying all the pretty QE-required eye candy. But it's simply
not possible for the graphics card to accelerate said eye candy.
Even though you're seeing it, I have to assume that the performance
was pretty bad, because the CPU would have to do all the work.
- Luca Rescigno
Hi Luca,
You're absolutely right. It doesn't work. The reader who
reported that his friend had had success on a G3 iBook had received
faulty information.
We have amended the Mailbag entry .
Thanks for the information and link.
Charles
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