Slow graphical effects performance

Question

Level 1

14 points

Slow graphical effects performance

So I upgraded to Leopard last night and I love it! I expected a small downgrade in performance (which there is, but it's livable considering applications like Safari 5 run a lot faster than their Tiger counterparts) but I didn't expect such a reduction in graphics performance throughout the OS. Things like minimizing and opening the dashboard show that it's skipping frames when in Tiger they were so smooth and seamless. This is an iBook G4 with a 1.33ghz cpu, 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI graphics card with 32 megs of vram.

It also says:

Core Image:

Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

Quartz Extreme: Supported

Is it the hardware accelerated core image that's causing it? It should be plenty powerful to do these simple effects.

iBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11), G4 1.33ghz, 1.5gb RAM

Posted on Oct 27, 2011 3:23 PM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,225 points

Oct 27, 2011 3:44 PM in response to tanner1294

Leo/10.5 requires a lot more Video card power than Tiger/10.4 did, even ringing some G5s to there knees.

One Thing to make sure of is as few as Icons as possible on the Desktop... in 10.5.x every one is a Quartz Window rendering, requiring 3 times the resources of CPU, GPU, & RAM.

I think you should get Applejack...

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15667/applejack

After installing, reboot holding down CMD+s, (+s), then when the DOS like prompt shows, type in...

applejack AUTO

Then let it do all 6 of it's things.

At least it'll eliminate some questions if it doesn't fix it.

The 6 things it does are...

Correct any Disk problems.

Repair Permissions.

Clear out Cache Files.

Repair/check several plist files.

Dump the VM files for a fresh start.

Trash old Log files.

First reboot will be slower, sometimes 2 or 3 restarts will be required for full benefit... my guess is files relying upon other files relying upon other files! :-)

Disconnect the USB cable from any Uninterruptible Power Supply so the system doesn't shut down in the middle of the process.

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Answer 2

tanner1294 Author

Level 1

14 points

Oct 27, 2011 4:03 PM in response to BDAqua

Really? I wouldn't imagine a G5 having much trouble with Leopard especially considering Apple doesn't even give a minimum processor speed for it to run on a G5. I also wonder why they would want the icons rendered through Quartz considering it really doesn't sound like it's a speed improvement. I'll download AppleJack as soon as it's done updating Java.

I realize that Apple was moving on to Intel but it still seems odd that they would drop support so harshly on these systems. It's honestly like when MS released Vista. So many people tried installing it on their older XP machines and Vista ripped the poor computer's to shreds. After that MS made Windows 7 run better on older hardware like XP. Apple then continued to drop PPC support altogether 😟

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

239,225 points

Oct 27, 2011 5:15 PM in response to tanner1294

I also wonder why they would want the icons rendered through Quartz considering it really doesn't sound like it's a speed improvement.

Not for speed, just for the coolness of transparencies, & other cool yet superfluous crud. 😟

Then you could ask me about conspiracy theories to sell new Macs to the faithful! 😉

Heck, even some early IntelMacs cannot run Snowjob/10.7.x!

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