Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 1:54 AM |
macguruguy |
I'm having a problem in OS 10.2.6 with screen effects suddenly being very choppy and slow. When I originally installed 10.2, there were no problems. Using ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition video card, 512MB RAM, PowerTower Pro w/Sonnet G4 800mhz. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 3:43 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Marty, I can't fully agree with you. My opinion, of course. Yes, Aqua is a more copmplex graphic interface than some other systems, but WinXP uses transparency, shadows, etc, and it is snappy. But that's not the point. As for "never", who knows? Computers improves technology in a geometric progression. I'm writing this now on OS 9, and the browser scroll ir really fast, like I was sliding a real printed paper sheet over the monitor. I wonder why this can't happen in OS X, since it's exactly the same screen, and 'move pixels' is a 2D accelerated feature of the Radeon whether QE is ON or OFF. Dragging windows, which is basically the same thing, is incredibly fast in OS X with QE enabled. It feels like OS X has some trouble gathering the page to be scrolled from memory and sending it to the video card. BTW, how does your browser scroll this page? OS 9 benefit from hardware acceleration in a way OS X 'does not', I wouldn't say 'cannot'. I think it was a choice of the developers. ANd yes, the benefits of running OS X are unquestionable. If this is the price of running OS X, what the heck, I can live with that. The DIVX codes I installed in OS X are DIVX 5.0.7 and 3IVX (not certain about the version, but the latest, I believe). They work well in OS 9, I believe that maybe something driver-related (as well as choppy scroll?). Anyone? Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I barely can't wait to get Panther running... |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 2:07 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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OSX due to it's aqua rendering model does not have as "snappy" a video feel to it, and it NEVER will. Old technology operating systems like OS9 and Windoze benefit from hardware acceleration of the video in a way that OSX cannot. Since Aqua is doing much more complex compositing of the screens, the CPU is involved much more in every operation, even with a radeon...l So, no your browser scrolling in OSX will never feel as responsive as it did under 9 or windows, but there are many other benefits. Also the Divx thing is dependent on whether the software codec uses hardware to speed it up (ie Altivec or ATI). So this remains unknown, but probably will never work all that well on these machines. All that said, 10.3 is supposed to provide a noticeable speed increase on G3 hardware, so perhaps there is life left in the old box yet. In reality if you are interested in this type of activity (Divx), your might be better served by a faster mac. http://macofalltrades.com has some good deals. Marty |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects - can't play DIVX |
September, 10, 2003 6:30 AM |
voxxdigital |
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Oh, I was forgetting this one. I tried to paly an AVI DIVX movie other day, and no go. Well, the movie appeared, but instead of 24 frames/sec it was 0.6 fps. I could play it in OS 9 at 18 fps, which is not ideal. It is stored on a external USB-2 hard drive, 7500 RPM, can copy a 600MB file in about 3 minutes, so it's not related to the HD throughput, I think. I'm using the DIVX codec and 3IVX codec. Isn't DIVX supposed to be acceleratd by hardware such as MPEG or DVD? My stepdaughter has a junky $500 PC with onboard display which plays the same movie as if it were a DVD player. BTW, the same PC scrolls the Explorer window faster than any ATI card I ever saw. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 5:58 AM |
voxxdigital |
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Ah, as for the cache, how can I be so certain that the cache is ON or OFF? L2CacheConfig says it's ON, but it donesn't feels exactly "on" (!). Apple System Profiler says that the processor have 256k of L2 cache, but it has 512. I don't know if I can trust ASP, if this is a sypmtom of something or what. L2CacheConfig reports 512. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 5:54 AM |
voxxdigital |
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Hmmmm... :-/ I reinstalled the 10.2.6 combo updater then repaired permissions. In fact, this made some speed improvement. With the update, QE was reset to OFF, and I compared screen performance. Even more choppy than with QE on*. Then reinstalled ATI drivers, set QE to ON, repaired permissions. Well, this is the fastest I could get so far since 10.2.0 - but not as fast as 10.2.0. I was watching the application icons bouncing in the Dock before they launch, and I noticed the System Preferences icon bounced twice in the Dock before launch in 10.2.0. with 10.2.6, it bounces 12 times..., spinning.... wheel........, then launchs. With "System Otimizer", I got 18 bounces :-( . Now, after reinstalling update, etc, etc, System Prefenreces icon is bouncing 4-6 times before launch. Not too bad, but not ideal. *as for "choppy" screen, I must say that with QE ON, *certain* screen effects are indeed lightning fast, such as moving whole windows. But scrolling (such as in Internet Explorer) is a different story. VERY choppy, altough it would be, roughly, the same effect as moving windows. Resizing is also unacceptably slow. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 2:32 AM |
mjoecups358 |
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Actually not so stupid... There was actually an ATI installer around for a while that installed the older driver in 10.2 thereby breaking the 3d support entirely. ATI updated this months ago though.... Now you should be able to download and install the ATI radeon support for OSX on 10.2 and up without a problem. Don't know about XPF 3 (yet). Marty |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 1:26 AM |
macguruguy |
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Or maybe it was XPostFacto 3 beta that changed something? Had trouble loading, so I went back to XPostFacto 2.2.5 to boot from 9. Sorry if these ideas sound stupid, but I don't have enough experience in X yet to understand it. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 10, 2003 1:23 AM |
macguruguy |
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Wow, I missed out on alot! I asked the original question. I think maybe it has something to do with the current ATI installer. I remember that I didn't install the ATI driver initially with the installer, and everything was running fine. But later I installed the ATI drivers, just to make sure I was up-to-date, and then I discovered the problem not long after that. Anybody agree with this? How can I revert to the originally installed ATI drivers in X? |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 8:44 PM |
marcush |
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I reinstalled the combo updater but that did not help. When I mentioned prefs I was talking about the prefs for iMovie and iDVD. Probably should not have mentioned that because it is not strictly relevant. My last option was to format my drive and reinstall. That's what it came to for me. You could make the system cron script run sooner by editing it directly and changing the frequency at which it runs or you could make your own to run at a frequency you prefer. That way you don't have to mess with the system-wide script. I'm not convinced that that will help you though. The problem must be deeper in the system. And your are certain that your L2 and L3 cache are enabled? |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 5:46 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Oh, this choppy performance was happening way before I installed the Radeon card. It was the same with the Rage Orion 128 (which doesn't support QE), the Radeon with QE actually gave the system a slightly more snappy feel in some cases. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 5:46 PM |
powderhaus |
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QE on PCi macs is good if you are running a bunch of programs at the same time (with the exception of video editing apps). It takes the load of graphics off of the processor. now if you are gamming you don't want it on because you processor with nothing else on it is more powerfull than the Radeon. But if you are going to use your computer for just browsing the web/mail then the interface will be fine without it, but if you turn on iTunes you want to put QE on, it makes a HUGE difference for me with a G4 400. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 5:33 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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QE is not supported on PCI slot macs and produced unknown/bad effects on performance. Turn it off!!!! Marty |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 4:37 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Ok, I already repaired permissions, and this gave only a small degree of improvement to the system. This 'cache cleaning' and 'force cron script' thing, I did using a shareware which actually made the system even slower. Is there a way to do this manually? Which preferences did you delete? Does this actually helped you or was the reinstall itself that brought performance back? BTW, did you reinstall the update only (combo?) or the whole system from scratch? Sorry if this sounds confusing, but I'm really puzzled. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 3:55 PM |
marcush |
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Puzzling.... I did a clean install of 10.2 and updated to 10.2.6 in mid-July because, I'm not certain which did it, after a series of updates that came in June and July I noticed severely degraded performance in Final Cut Pro 3. I repaired permissions, cleared out caches and forced cron scripts to run, reinstalled the combo update, and deleted preference files to no avail. I did the reinstall to see if this fixed my problem, which it did and then allowed Quicktime to update. I also took the last security update and Java. I suspected either the Quicktime or the Security update for July as having caused my problem but everything is working wonderfully under 10.2.6 since then. My point is that there was something terribly wrong in software and I could not find it. Biting the bullet and reinstalling fresh has worked for me. The only major pieces of software that I have not yet allowed back onto my machine are iMovie 3 and iDVD 3. I now have a backup drive with a cloned good working install of 10.2.6 that I can fall back to if performance goes south again. |
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by the way |
September, 09, 2003 3:31 PM |
voxxdigital |
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BTW, I don't believe this is directly related to the ATI Radeon card itself (mine is a PC card flashed to Mac). At least it works really fast and snappy in OS 9. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 2:56 PM |
voxxdigital |
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Hmmmm..... :-/ Maybe, yes. But I noticed that the whole system became very choppy after 10.2.6 (spinning wheel, etc) I'm writing this on my Performa 6360 with built-in ATI display, OS 9.2.2 and I realized that Internet Explorer scrolls WAY smoother than the PM9600/G3/Radeon/etc... Anyone knows if the ATI installer installs OpenGL? I installed the latest version on my 9600 (which is supposed to work "up to 10.2.4 only"), but actually nothing changed at all. Not a single error, not a single improvement. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 2:35 PM |
powderhaus |
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I rememberr the hit comming in 10.2.3/4 and i believe that they updated the OpenGL libraries then too, now that i think about it.so maybe its just our cards don't go well with the new openGL version. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 1:07 PM |
voxxdigital |
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I have a Power Mac 9600/Sonnet G3-400, 320MB RAM, Radeon 7000 64MB DDR, and I'm experiencing EXACTLY the same. Screen effects are very choppy and sluggish, altough QE is ON. When I first installed OSX 10.2, it was VERY snappy, even with my old ATI Rage Orion 128, without QE. Then when I applied the 10.2.6 Combo update the whole system became choppy. I reinstalled the update, repaired permissions in Disk Utility, but still no solution. I even tried some "system optimizer" sharewares, but all I got was to slow down even more my machine. |
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RE: Choppy Screen Effects |
September, 09, 2003 11:31 AM |
marcush |
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Try installing the 10.2.6 combo update to get the ATI drivers reinstalled. Then run "repair permissons" in disk utility |