So, you are not going to get every window treated as a texture, and, though you may have enabled QE, you aren't going to see much benefit from it.

Think about it for a second. Let's say, hypothetically, that you actually have no VRAM available for textures at all, and thus the contents of every window have to be moved over the AGP bus any time the window is moved/changed/exposed/etc.

This may sound bad, but it's still better than plain old Quartz. Using plain Quartz, the CPU renders the window contents and then initiates a DMA transfer to push it over to the graphics card. So either way, you're still pushing the same number of pixels over the AGP bus, except with plain Quartz the CPU has more rendering work to do and it has to manage the transfer of the data over the the graphics card.

So even there is no VRAM available at all for textures, QE should still be at least a little better since the graphics card is offloading some rendering work from the CPU and managing the AGP transfers on its own.

Is this documented anywhere, did you find it out experimentally, or is it just an unverified hypothesis?

I am merely curious, since I also use a Rev.B TiBook/667 and mostly with an external LCD 1280x1024 monitor (while the TiBook stays closed, its display turned off). Strange that 1/2 VRAM would go unused in that configuration. Is the Radeon forcing this?

The first iMacs (the ones without slot loading drives) had an unsupported PCI-like slot, but the best (only) video card you could get was a Voodoo2, which wouldn't help you any even if you had an expansion slot, which I believe your iMac doesn't.

The first generation, Revision A, were the 400MHz/500MHz models with the ATI Rage as their video chips - incapable of Quartz Extreme (It's also the one I happen to own BTW). The second, Revision B, the one the story's talking about now, were the 500MHz/667MHz models with a 16MB VRAM Radeon Mobility video chip. The one Apple sells now are Revision C, 667MHz/800MHz models with a 32MB VRAM Radeon Mobility 7500.

I can see how setting the minimum requirement from 16 down to 8 would give you at least minimal functionality, but consider this: an 1152x768x32 screen takes up about 3.5MB on your video card, and when it's double buffered, you've now eaten up 7MB and change. And that's just the screen -- you still need space for all of those window textures. The 16MB number really isn't a marketing number -- it's based on the realities of how much space large bitmaps take up on video card.

Which part of some improvement > no improvement do you think is a bad thing ?

An iBook purchased over a year ago will not support QE. Only the newest revision iBook (the 700 mhz and the CD 600 mhz) will support it. So either your friend did not buy it that long ago, or his system is not supported...

Have you been paying attention to this thread? The other possibility is that the old iBook does support QE with the .plist modifications, which is the whole point of this discussion.

Yes, and the last verison of the OS was dog slow. The new one is just slow, so any extra speed I can eke out of it is great.

[...]but whining about how you want to sell your PowerBook in disgust sounds like a desperate cry for attention.

Actually, the "disgust" part stems from the facts that a) this machine is less than 9 months old and has now effectively been obseleted and b) that this limitation to QE is not mentioned *anywhere* in official Apple documentation. It not being a supported configuration I can live with, but what effectively amounts to deception of customers is what *really* pisses me off.

Maybe you should sell your PowerBook and buy a wintel laptop [...]

Except then I wouldn't be able to use OS X which, slow and flawed as it is, provides the best mix of functionality for the tasks I do.

then you'll never have to worry about not being able to use a new feature in an OS upgrade that makes your machine faster, because there's never been such a thing.

Actually there has, but the trend comes more from the hardware not being so damn slow to start with on the x86 side.