[muglo] Re: G3/G4 difference? (was: Re: Jaguar on an early G4)
- From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 13:00:57 -0500
The difference in speed due to bus speeds will be marginal at best (the CPU,
GPU and RAM are what make the difference in the end (my G3/400 512 MB RAM
can, at times, be much more responsive and faster than a G3/600 iBook with
128 MB RAM).
PS I didn't think the first AGPs were optimised for Quartz Extreme either.
OS X and Quartz on a B&W G4/500 will make use of every last ounce of
hardware acceleration available in the 16 MB ATI RAGE 128 PRO. It's this
Quartz Extreme thingy that won't be available to you (?) (I don't have it so
I don't know what it does) but regular old acceleration is _fully_ utilised
(trust me, there's a huge difference b/t 16 and 8 MB of video RAM, more than
can be explained by 50 MHz speed difference).
My Pismo has full graphics acceleration support (I think it was the only
real PowerBook G3 to have support right away... even the "Wallstreet" and
the Beige G3 (both with tiny (2 MB) graphics cards) now have acceleration)
so I imagine your wife's does too ;).
Without GPU acceleration Aqua would be unbearable on a 400 MHz G3, and my
DVD player wouldn't work (man, is it smooth in OS X... I can play DVDs *and*
do other stuff at the same time and I don't experience *any* frame loss (of
course, browsing the web or whatever is sluggish ;))!!!
I can really tell that less RAM is available for off-screen
buffers/accerlation when I'm doing monitor spanning with my 17". It's great
to have that much real estate (1024*768+1152*870... 2176x768 + a little left
over (1152*102... 576*204... not bad))) but scrolling through windows and
moving them around takes a performance hit (responsiveness is the same but
updates are slower). When I run only the 17" (PB in "clamshell" mode)
windows updates are smooth as can be.
PSS I think the Pismo has an AGP as opposed to a PCI laptop graphics card
(PCMCIA/cardbus is essentially the laptop version of the PCI bus) which
might explain why Apple supported it from the get-go.
Eric.
on 24/3/03 7:07 AM, Joe McGuire at theguy@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> It will not run quite as good as a true G4 500Mhz machine due to the
> front side bus, but it will certainly run faster than the G3 it is
> replacing. Graphics acceleration won't be possible as (if I am not
> mistaken) it requires an agp card, though I seem to remember a hack out
> there to get it to work on older machines. Try macosxhints for that one.
> Even if it doesn't, my wife runs it on her pismo which does not support
> graphics accel, and it runs quite well.
>
> Joe McGuire aka tinfoil
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: muglo-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:muglo-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Alex
> Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2003 11:27 PM
> To: muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [muglo] G3/G4 difference? (was: Re: Jaguar on an early G4)
>>> does this also hold true for G4 upgraded G3's? As in, a G3 with a G4
>>> Apple ZIF? Is it the zif or the motherboard design that makes the
>>> diff?
>>
>> Yes, I think the answer to your question is, yes.
>>
>> The mobo design will have less of an impact on performance, but that's
>> because the Beige G3s ran at 66 MHz bus speed vs. the 100 MHz in the
> B&W G3s
>> & the Yikes G4s.
>>
>
> ok. So this means that a B&W with, say, a G4 500mhz upgrade will run
> OSX just like a real G4?
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