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Quartz Extreme with Unsupported Video Cards

Posted by pudge on from the hack-a-licious dept.

BandwidthHog writes "This thread over at Ars Technica discusses a simple .plist hack to enable Quartz Extreme on the PCI version of a supported video card, i.e. the original Radeon PCI and Radeon 7000, two of the most popular video cards for those of us running on 'unsupported' OldWorld machines."

7 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. More info... by catseye · · Score: 5, Informative
    There's also a small set of reader reports on xlr8yourmac.com here about this hack. Apparently there can be some odd artifacts/display problems, and the speed increase is minimal, but other than that it works! Pretty cool.

    -A.

    --
    What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
  2. Re:Question by catseye · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just a note: I've not actually used this hack since I'm running a G4/867 and a Dual 1GHz Quicksilver. I just posted the link to more information (and because I think xlr8yourmac.com is a great resource; I like to promote it. ;) )

    If you follow the link, it looks like most people are just using plain Radeon PCI cards and having pretty consistent success. I mentioned the artifacts only because one person complained of minor screen weirdness (the "preview" in column view wouldn't display correctly) but I wouldn't say that problem is even necessarily the fault of the hack.

    With the reduced bandwidth of plain PCI versus AGP, however, I wonder what the real benefits will be. But it looks like it certainly doesn't hurt! Good luck.

    -A.

    --
    What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
  3. It does indeed work, but artifacts do exist. by johnpg · · Score: 4, Informative

    I did the hack last night. I have both a supported AGP and "unsupported" Radeon PCI. The PCI is my second display. Initially the hack turned QE on for the PCI but OFF on the AGP. That of course was undersirable, but simply removing the preference fixed that and both displays are QE enabled.

    For example the orignal is set up as:

    <key>GLCompositorRequiredClasses</key>
    <array>
    <string>IOAGPDevice</string>
    </array>

    They suggest you change IOAGPDevice to IOPCIDevice. But to make it work on both just remove it, like:

    <key>GLCompositorRequiredClasses</key>
    <array>
    </array>

    What did that do for me? Well for one thing I've seen the same artifact issues with column view quicktime previews as others have reported. It's no big deal however. I also had a kernel panic upon my initial reboot after enabling the hack. I rebooted again and it was fine and has been ever since.

    I've not noticed a large speed increase, but it is a bit better. What you do get are some effects that are normally turned off when not using QE (transition fading when using automatic wallpaper switching), etc.

    I'm sure there are reasons why this wasn't enabled by Apple...besides them wanting everyone to buy a new Mac. But all in all the hack does work and is worth checking out.

    John

  4. Put a screensaver on your desktop! by tbmaddux · · Score: 3, Informative
    If you get it to work, try this after choosing a "Screen Effects" in System Preferences (watch out for spaces that Slashcode inserts in the path):

    /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/R esources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/Scre enSaverEngine -background &

    Flurry is a good one with OpenGL particles. Make a transparent yellow-on-black Terminal window, run 'top', sit back and groove on the juicy goodness.

    --
    Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
  5. Re:What about non-supported AGP cards? by TWR · · Score: 4, Informative
    Unless you can redesign that Rage 128 Pro by yourself, and add support for T&L and textures that aren't powers of two in length or width, Quartz Extreme isn't going to work on your computer.

    Unfortunately, people have gotten their brains stuck on the amount of VRAM a card has. It's not so much the VRAM as it is the functionality of the video card (well, more VRAM does help, of course. But it's not the limiting reagent).

    -jon

    --

    Remember Amalek.

  6. Re:shocked and appalled by tupps · · Score: 3, Informative

    Often these restrictions are placed simply because of the amount of testing that is required. Also the PCI cards are all non Apple standard (although some where sold in the apple store) but this means that you would have to test: Each Different Video Card In Each different Machine Type In different slots With different PCI setups Now I am assuming that there are 5 dfferent video cards sold capable of QE (I just made this up), there are at least 6 setups of hardware architecture (counting revisions in G4 desktops (3), B&W desktops (2), Beige Machines). 3 slots per machine, and a standard set of PCI cards to test against (say 6 cards eg SCSI, IDE controllers, Video Input Cards). Now that makes 540 different tests that needs to be performed. Now if each test only took 30 minutes from setup to pull down, that makes a month of testing for one person. Now that occurs assuming no problems are found! My guess it was to difficult, didn't provide any real benefit and therefore you can leave it out and people can modify there machines with an ***unsupported*** hack. Thanks Luke

    --
    Go out and get sailing!
  7. Re:PCI problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Thanks. Unfortunately, from ATI's website:

    As AGP is required to cache textures from main memory, the Quartz Extreme feature is only available on AGP-based ATI RADEON graphics cards. It will be disabled for all PCI graphics cards.

    And since the B&W G3 platform is PCI only (I should have known that), I guess I'll stick with the stock ATI Rage 128 for a while longer. Still, I'm glad I upped it to a 550 MHz G4.