Quartz Extreme with Unsupported Video Cards

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."

Comments

Re:Put a screensaver on your desktop!

[Van Halen]

Cool trick. I was in an Apple Store on Monday and went around testing the performance of various machines using this. Of course the DP 1GHz suffered no noticeable lag compared to a static background. I was surprised to find that the 800 MHz TiBook showed no slowdown either. The iBooks were quite slow, and exhibited greenish box artifacts around all the windows while it was running. Although in regular screen saver mode, flurry ran great on them as well.

Honestly, I think they ought to leave at least one or two machines in the store running this just to show how powerful QE can be. But as knowledgeable as they may be, I'll bet most of the salespeople there didn't know what happened or how to turn it off - other than rebooting. ;-)

Wish I could have tried this on my 733 at home, but I'm still on 10.1.5 and it doesn't support the -background option. It would have been interesting to compare the difference between that and Jaguar, with and without Quartz Extreme enabled. Anyone know if this (-background) will still work with QE disabled?

Re:Put a screensaver on your desktop!

[bnenning]

If you want a nice UI to control this, grab Fackbore Effects, which also lets you run multiple screen savers simultaneously.