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Jaguar Reviewed

Posted by pudge on from the my-mac-only-has-16mb-ddr-anyway dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "A review with a lot of screenshots of the latest beta seed (6C37) has been posted. The latest advancements look pretty promising. I, like everyone else, am itching for a release." I don't know if it is more pretty, or more promising, but it does look cool. Dock improvements, iChat, search the disk from Finder windows, QuickTime 6, Digital Hub section of System Preferences, Firewall preferences, major Speech improvements ...

4 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Quartz Extreme by thatguywhoiam · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I hear this vast sucking sound; it's coming from a massive lack of information about the one thing most of us are craving on OS X: speed. If others could chime in on this thread maybe we can figure some things out.

    From what I've gleaned so far we know the following:

    - QE is said to need a "nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card. 32MB VRAM recommended for optimum performance."

    - The wording on the above statement may or may not be read as "requires", depending on whom you ask.

    - The tech involved in such a feat described (single pipeline of composited video) is really advanced and interesting, and raises questions; i.e. what does it mean for OS X when the entire drawing system is offloaded to custom chips? (or on a completely side note: what does it mean when you have standardized hardware-accel. video for your OS, and the Finder is now utterly replaceable? Things like this?)

    - The tech involved in QE may have come from Raycer, a company Apple acquired in early 2000. Raycer developed high-performance 3D visualization solutions using OpenGL. Apple consequently has a patent (lost the #, sorry) on vague things like 'large-scale grid transformations' (paraphrasing).

    - A lot of us iBook owners, and other Rage128-based Mac owners, would like to know if QE will work partially, or at all, on this hardware.

    So who can comment intelligently on what's happening here?

    --
    If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
    1. Re:Quartz Extreme by Hadlock · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "A lot of us iBook owners, and other Rage128-based Mac owners, would like to know if QE will work partially, or at all, on this hardware."

      in short - You're Phucked.

      quarts extreme is going to be the "killer app" to get everyone to upgrade from their "legacy" hardware, to the new ibooks and whatnot that you'll see comming out @ macworld NY. i'd suggest selling your ibook now, or at least get someone with cash in hand lined up for it, as it's about to devalue by about $300 :)

      it's no coincidence that the new tibook came out with a 32 meg ati radeon 7500 a week before they released the minimum "optimal performance" specs for quartz extreme. so far the only laptops capable of quartz extreme is the rev. b & c tibooks. all ibooks, crt imacs, and g3 powerbooks are Phucked.

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
  2. Re:Audio!! ?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just a tidbit: if you look at the SpyMac pics of Jaguar, there seems to be a 'MIDI Setup' app; it has a pair of XLRs for an icon. Seems promising.

  3. Quartz Extreme by owenc · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If anyone is wondering exactly what Quartz Extreme could do, here's a screenshot.

    There's a DVD playing. The teacups are floating around from a different application. They are chrome.

    They are reflecting in real time what the movie is playing.

    (probably why it won't work on my Rage 128)