Looking at platforms objectively [X4U]

[Kuestner, Bjoern]

> On the question of GUI performance, is there a noticable difference?
> I normally only do 2D stuff, and the GUI on Mac OS X seems to be much more
> responsive.  Though I wasn't to happy that I couldn't run C&C:Generals 
> at the top settings on my G5 2x2.

There's a huge difference. When was the last time scrolling speed was an
issue for a computer? I still remember throttling window scrolling on my 180
MHz PPC 603e running Mac OS 7 because it was so unusably lightning fast. 

Here I go with an iBook and a 500 MHz G3 and OS X is a pain for its GUI
slowness. Things got better with Jaguar, then Panther and definitely now
with Tiger. Sure, that's relatively old hardware, and once it's fast enough,
you don't want it to be any faster anyway. But for picture scrolling etc.
there's still a problem.

You could "blame" OS X's superior fully buffered windowing architecture
which allows such neat tricks as playing a movie while it genie-minimizing
into the dock. Quite cool for an ancient iBook. Stuff like that shows off
the power of OS X's Quartz architecture. 

But Quartz was definitely built for the future, not for current hardware.
Quartz Extreme was one step to get hardware graphics acceleration back which
was basically lost with OS X. But the transition isn't complete until we
have Quartz 2D Extreme. Only then will almost all the things we previously
had run as effortlessly (or so it appears to the user) as they have before
... plus the many new things that Quartz allows.

It's interesting to note, however, that Microsoft tries to move Windows into
the same direction with Avalon, which was once touted as a feature of
Longhorn. They're not there yet, it don't know if Avalon is still advertised
as part of Longhorn or not. XP still uses the older, traditional 2D approach
vs. Quartz's multi-layered "somewhat 3D-paradigm" (that's meant from a
technical perspective ... from a user perspective the window layering
appears similar to the user).

> Once the switch to Intel Architecture happens, we'll hopefully get decent
VNC

Why would that be? You probably mean Virtual PC or VPC, not VNC, right?

Yes, I'm looking forward to a free and adequately performing emulator built
on WINE. It'll take a while, as WINE is built for Linux. But I'm optimistic
that we will see this sort of software. Nice.

Bjorn








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