[Riemann Zeta]

I enabled QuartzGl on my recently converted mini9...and I can't tell if it is doing anything to either hinder or increase drawing/ui responsiveness. Frankly I'm surprised the driver supported it, considering the overall crapiness of the GMA950. Does anyone have any anecdotal evidence that QuartzGL helps...or, by contrast, causes weirdness? Does the GMA950 even have the ability to handle QGL?

[kabelabs]

supposedly, the gma 950 is supposed to fully handle quartzgl.

[tastewar]

Where would one make this setting, and what is the intention?

[chazzek]

I've never noticed much of a performance difference with QuartzGL enabled. On the other hand, a lot of apps have really glitchy graphics with QGL because they're not properly debugged. And when they're not optimized, QGL can sometimes be slower, owing to more memory copying than the software Quartz 2D path.

Ars Technica gave it a pretty good rundown in their Tiger review a few years ago: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews...sx-10-4.ars/13

[tastewar]

OK, I see you can go into System Profiler under Graphics/Displays, and for the built in display it shows Quartz Extreme Supported but that doesn't tell me (nor does the earlier reply) whether it is enabled, and if not, how one might go about enabling it. Anyone?

[chazzek]

Install the dev tools and start up Quartz Debug. It's under Tools -> Enable QuartzGL. You'll have to restart any apps you want to use it with. Quartz Debug automatically disables QuartzGL when it quits, so you'll have to do a Force Quit to get the setting to persist. As I said though, there's little noticeable performance gain and some apps, usually Carbon apps, will be glitchy.

[tastewar]

Ah -- I was thinking it was more mainstream than that, and that I was just missing something in System Prefs. Thanks for clarifying.

[Riemann Zeta]

I don't tend to see a lot of problems with applications bugging out when QuartzGL is enabled on a modern (i.e. 10.5.6) leopard system. With 10.4, this was clearly not the case. So, if the GMA950 isn't just lying to me about supporting QGL, I figure that I'll keep it enabled, just like I do on my 'big' Mac (Penryn MBP w/ 8600M).

If anyone who wants to use QGL has a specific problem with a given application (buggy rendering, slowness, crashing), it is easy to fix this issue on 10.5.X without killing QGL system-wide. Just go into the .app bundle and edit the Info.plist file with the property list editor, so you can make a new sibling variable. Make the variable of type 'boolean,' set the default value to 'no' and then name the variable "QuartzGLEnable"--save the Info.plist file and launch the application again; QGL will be disabled for that application, but will still work for others. Apple originally planned to allow developers to opt in or out of using QGL on an app-by-app basis, but for whatever reason, they chose to shitcan QGL and ship 10.5 with it as a 'hidden' option only, instead of the system default behavior.

[bitboxx]

Hi ppl,

QuartzGL doesn't need to be enabled, QGL aware application will enable it by itself. You can enable Quartz 2D Extreme and try to disable Beam Sync to increase performance. Just Google about these terms if you want to know more.

The easiest way to tweak these settings is to use "Secrets", available on http://secrets.blacktree.com/.

[chazzek]

AFAIK, you need to first enable QGL in Leopard for it to respect per-app settings. That is, until Apple turns it on by default, the vast majority of users won't benefit from apps that are QGL-ready. Quartz 2D Extreme is the old name for QuartzGL -- they're the same thing.