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Your iBooks is just fine...
Authored by: marcinjeske on May 21, '02 02:09:58AM

Stop worrying... nobody is taking your iBook away.

1. Quartz Extreme takes advantage of unused hardware when it makes sense to do so... While we've already conjectured that AGP 2X is a limiting factor (to allow enough bandwidth to make QE efficient, I believe another bottleneck is memory. As was pointed out elsewhere, buffering an entire screen (1024 x 768 at 32 depth) takes about 3MB of memory. Now, looking just now at how many screenfuls of windows I have open, I'd estimate 5. Therefore, if QE works the way we think, my system would require approx. 15MB of video memory.

The recommended 32MB provides about 10 screenfuls... pretty decent.
But the 8MB which came in your iBook 2001 could only muster about two and a half. That pretty much makes it pointless, as it would only be useful when switching between a couple of visible windows... quite a minimalist windowing environment. Every performance tweak has trade-offs, and in this case, I think Apple decided that shuttling windows back and forth on the iBook 2001 slower bus, with little to show for, was not worth the effort.

Your iBook is fully supported by Mac OS X. Your hardware simply can't take advantage of some of the improvements. While such a situation is unfortunate, it is a necessary by-product of technological change. New hardware introduces new capabilities which older hardware can't match. And even in situations where newer features could be written for older technology, the benefits gained are so small or even negative, that the effort is a waste.

- Marcin (who is chugging away with Mac OS X on a beige G3, the oldest "fully supported" Mac OS X computer.)



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