Marc Liyanage has created a small Cocoa app that checks if the machine is using Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.
Quartz Extreme uses a supported (see below) graphics card built into your Mac to relieve the main PowerPC chip of on screen calculations. This dramatically improves system performance, making Jaguar much more responsive. Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen. The graphics processor focuses on what it does best ? graphics ? freeing the Power PC chip to do more operations in the same amount of time. Everything is zippier.
Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs:
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.
More info and download link here.
I thought all you had to do was look at your cursor to tell if it’s using QE. Drop shadow under your cursor means it’s using QE, no drop shadow means it’s not. Right?
I had a drop shadow on my cursor and I wasn’t running Quartz Extreme. I think that’s a myth.
yeah…what he said…actually, I’ve seen people asking this question on the MacWorld Mac911 forums, and that’s was Chris Breen said too
oops…I meant: yeah, what nick said…bill slipped one in on me while I was typing!
There’s an easier way to tell:
Go to System Preferences, Desktop, set the background to switch periodically. If the background fades from one to the next, you have QE. If it replaces without the fade, you don’t.
There CAN’T be an easier way to check than this: try it.
I run a 450 cube with 10.2, stock AGP card. Test shows I am not using extreme. How do I get it to use extreme?
You can’t. Sorry.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html
Down at the bottom right, see the list of video card requirements.
Definitely a cool app, but still no easier than the method that I suggested, since this requires download.
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