Quartz Extreme Demo Movie

Anonymous Coward writes "The Swedish web site MacNytt has a QuickTime demo of Quartz Extreme (the graphics acceleration technology in the upcoming Mac OS X "Jaguar" release). It is impressive footage, truly impressive. Now I can watch DVDs at a microscopic level!"

Comments

Re:/.'d already

[BeenaBerry]

Don't you think users with poor vision might appreciate being able to zoom their screen?

Downloaded the movie

[Craig Maloney]

I downloaded the movie, and you can too! Just go through the main page and select the Swedish equivalent of "Films". It's accessable from there.

It's pretty damn impressive. I think we've seen yet another advance in GUI technology from Apple.

Mirrors

[rgraham]

http://members.cox.net/ronin4701/QuartzExtremeTest riktigfil.mov

http://clem.mscd.edu/~grahamry/QuartzExtremeTest ri ktigfil.mov

Re:are screenshots a thing of the past?

[shunnicutt]

The blackout of the DVD has nothing to do with the graphics card -- DVDs are blacked out to prevent people from infringing copyrighted material.

The DVD window isn't actually black -- it's a dark shade of ugly green and the system uses something to replace that with the DVD footage. In OS9, you could set your desktop graphic to this color and play DVDs on your desktop. :)

To confirm that you can take screen shots of graphics that are accelerated in the graphics card, I took a screen shot of iTunes showing a psychedelic animation inside a window. The screen shot shows the openGL graphics as well as the desktop and other windows.

Pismo?!

[SPYvSPY]

That machine is ancient in Mac-time. You don't see me griping about not having HW acceleration on a Lombard do you? No, I went out and bought a DP 800 G4 so I could play too.

Why is it that you purchased a machine with a cripple mobile graphics card and then were surprised to discover its limitations?

Re:wonderful, *IF* you've got a Radeon or GF2...

[SpamJunkie]

Quartz extreme is *not* meant for everyone. It is lucky that Apple is releasing it this early at all; Microsoft's fully accellerated GUI is more than a year away, likely more than two. Unaccellerated Quartz is still very fast and very advanced - still unlike anything any other OS has.

Also doing text on GL has always been a bit weird - lining up pixels and so on is kind of awkward. Unaccellerated Quartz will always be there, and always be reliable. It's not like Apple is suddenly making OS X only work on these video cards.

You're not going to expect Doom III to work on these machines as well, are you?

Re:wonderful, *IF* you've got a Radeon or GF2...

[Mononoke]

disappointing and downright rude if you've got 1+ month old iBook, a 5+ month old iMac, or a 9+ month old PowerBook. In other words, the majority of Macs sold in the past year (and 95% of OSX-capable Macs sold before that) cannot use Quartz Extreme.

Yes, how dare Apple develop new technology that utilizes the latest (and future) hardware to its fullest! What were they thinking?!?

That's just like those damn ID Software people that keep putting out new games that make us buy new video cards!

Anyway...one clarification:

the majority of Macs sold in the past year (and 95% of OSX-capable Macs sold before that) cannot use Quartz Extreme.

You forgot "to its fullest extent." Read the Quartz Extreme specs again, and pay special attention to the word 'recommended.' Look it up if you need to.

Before everyone starts their bitching...

[Lally Singh]

Yes, Quartz Extreme requires a 32MB AGPx2 video card. That's because everything is now rendered to OpenGL and then the card takes care of the drawing from there. So, it simply _can't_ work on older graphics cards that don't do much 3D optimization, like the Rage128.

So, you can't do lots of cool little tricks. Jaguar does have plenty of other graphics optimizations. I've seen it fly on iBooks. It's simply faster. OS X has up until now been worked on for functionality, not speed. Now Apple's optimizing it, and it is crazy fast. CRAZY FAST.

Re:DVD screengrabs in OSX

[shunnicutt]

Snapz Pro can only grab shots from DVD if you're using an Nvidia card.

Re:wonderful, *IF* you've got a Radeon or GF2...

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

Yeah, I was kind of ticked it wasn't going to work with my little iBook ... in retrospect, it makes sense to expect that though. To store a texture big enough for my iBooks screen of size 1024 * 768 at 32bpp(4 bytes) takes 3 megs. Then consider overlapping windows (typically LOTS of those, at least the way I use computers) and other overhead... it all adds up, I suppose.

It was just a nasty surprise to read about how sexy cool Quartz Extreme would be until I'm drooling, then get all of those dreams dashed to pieces by brutal, brutal reality. Such is life.

Re:wonderful, *IF* you've got a Radeon or GF2...

[singularity]

Yes, how dare Apple develop new technology that utilizes the latest (and future) hardware to its fullest!

Exactly! I am still upset that Apple is adding AltiVec enhancements. If iMacs and iBooks cannot benifit from it, Apple should never start adding it to the OS until every machine offered by Apple has had at least a G4 for at least a year (so as to prevent anyone from yelling "But I just bought my iBook six months ago, and it will not support it!")

/sarcasm

All indications show that Jaguar will offer a speed-up for non-QE capable machines.

Perhaps Apple could have written QE with the Rage Pro in mind. I am guessing doing that would seriously prevent the major speed-up we are going to see instead. Doing so would be ignoring the increased bandwidth offered by AGP 4x and the increased capabilities of having 32 megs of VRAM on-board.

I am glad to see Apple writing software for the future with the past in mind, but not driving development.