Success Story - Intel D865GLC - Maxtor 80GB IDE - 1 GB MEM - ATI PowerColor 9600 PRO - Minimal Mouse Tearing, Everything seems to be running too well. :) Options

[nb1878]

I'd like to share a success story with everyone. I started watching and reading the OSX86 Project's Wiki as well as the InsanelyMac forums for quite a while now. After playing a bit with Mac OS X on my Athlon 64 3700+ and inside VMware on Linux, I decided to try and piece together a machine from some old, some used, and some new parts.

Here is some system information:

Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: jMac
Machine Model: ADP2,1
CPU Type: Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 3.06 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
CPU Features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM SSE3 MON DSCPL TPR
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: BF86510A.86A.0063.P18.0406220349 (Intel Corp.)

Radeon 9600 AP:

Chipset Model: Radeon 9600 AP
Type: Display
Bus: PCI
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x4150
Revision ID: 0x0000
Displays:
DELL 2001FP:
Resolution: 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
Depth: 32-bit Color
Core Image: Not Supported
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Not Supported

So after experimenting a bit with various versions, and slight hardware changes, the most important change I've made is coming from a NVIDIA GeForce Ti series card to a ATI Radeon PowerColor 9600 PRO. My first test with the ATI card showed the mouse tearing problem. Pretty annoying to look at, most definitely. I went back to the NVIDIA card for a bit, with various versions of the macvidia drivers. Not overly impressed, so I swapped the ATI card back in.

The strange thing is, for the life of me now, I *can't* get the mouse tearing problem back. Yes - I *can't* seem to get the mouse tearing to appear now! I have no idea why. But I did write down what I did so maybe someone can enlighten me as to what it could have possibly been - in an effort to help everyone else on the boards.

Here goes:
1: BIOS - changed the AGP aperture value to 128 MB, up from 64 MB
2: New installation with ATI Radeon PowerColor 9600 PRO installed, used JaS 10.4.6.
3: Selected custom installation with the following options:

CODE

X11
SSE3
10.4.6 update

4: Installed without issue, skipped disc check, let it reboot when finished.
5: On first boot, I installed the SemjaZa 10.4.7 update.
6: Followed his instructions, double-checked each command.
7: Ran replace.sh., etc. (everything his doc had said)
8: Restarted when finished.
9: System booted fine - oddly "About this Mac" still shows 10.4.6.
10: Installed Logitech's Control Center 2.0 - the filename is lcc20.dmg - forgot where I got it now.
(I have a Logitech MX510 mouse and a Logitech Elite keyboard - highly recommended for Macs)
11: Rebooted - mouse tearing *IS* present up to this step. Mouse/keyboard work great, kudos to Logitech.
12: Installed Callisto b008, followed install instructions (to the letter) that come with the b008 archive.
13: Restarted - booted fine - mouse tearing *IS* present - though it *SEEMS* like it is a lot less frequent.
14: Followed Callisto b008 FAQ for (attempting) enabling of QE/CI. This forced me to change the /System/
Library/Extensions/ATIRadeon9700GA.plugin/Contents/Info.plist file's line that read

CODE

<string>IONDRVFramebuffer</string>

to

CODE

<string>CallistoFB</string>
<!--<string>IONDRVFramebuffer</string>-->

(I left the old line in, commented - in case this didn't work quite like I hoped)

15: Restarted - booted fine - took a little longer to get to the login screen, but eventually made it (~ 1 min.)
16: Mouse tearing was still there but it took about ten minutes for it to appear.
17: Not wanting to go back to that NVIDIA card - I remembered the IONDRVSupport.kext I had just
commented out. At a terminal, I did a

CODE

sudo su -

To get a root shell. Then, I did a

CODE

kextstat

18: The IONDRVSupport.kext kernel extension was still loaded. Interesting. Okay, I then did:

CODE

mv /System/Library/Extensions/IONDRVSupport.kext /

(forcing the kernel extension to not get loaded on reboot)
19: Restarted - booted fine. I've been up for about one hour now. Shuffling terminal windows,
scrolling this way and that, minimizing and restoring windows, and I cannot get the tearing to appear.

I'm currently running at 1600x1200x32@60Hz on a 20 inch flat panel. For completeness, I'll post xbench 1.3 results. If anyone wants to see logs, dmesg output, anything, let me know. Happy to provide it.

CODE

Results    68.14    
    System Info        
        Xbench Version        1.3
        System Version        10.4.6 (8I1119)
        Physical RAM        1024 MB
        Model        ADP2,1
        Drive Type        Maxtor 6L080P0
    CPU Test    56.35    
        GCD Loop    90.03    4.75 Mops/sec
        Floating Point Basic    59.38    1.41 Gflop/sec
        vecLib FFT    35.69    1.18 Gflop/sec
        Floating Point Library    66.59    11.59 Mops/sec
    Thread Test    96.78    
        Computation    78.16    1.58 Mops/sec, 4 threads
        Lock Contention    127.04    5.47 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
    Memory Test    97.97    
        System    88.98    
            Allocate    67.92    249.43 Kalloc/sec
            Fill    116.11    5645.36 MB/sec
            Copy    96.33    1989.68 MB/sec
        Stream    108.99    
            Copy    107.47    2219.76 MB/sec
            Scale    107.77    2226.42 MB/sec
            Add    111.02    2364.99 MB/sec
            Triad    109.77    2348.22 MB/sec
    Quartz Graphics Test    64.19    
        Line    64.35    4.28 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
        Rectangle    59.56    17.78 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
        Circle    59.74    4.87 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
        Bezier    87.69    2.21 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
        Text    57.40    3.59 Kchars/sec
    OpenGL Graphics Test    39.95    
        Spinning Squares    39.95    50.68 frames/sec
    User Interface Test    87.62    
        Elements    87.62    402.13 refresh/sec
    Disk Test    80.51    
        Sequential    112.46    
            Uncached Write    109.59    67.29 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    115.68    65.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    101.84    29.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    125.33    62.99 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    62.70    
            Uncached Write    29.12    3.08 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    107.52    34.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    85.38    0.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    118.46    21.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Apologies for being so verbose, it's out of an effort to be helpful to everyone.



Doh! I meant to explain why I said "minimal mouse tearing" in the topic. I just didn't want to guarantee I had mouse tearing gone completely. But a full hour and fifteen minutes after use, I have yet to see any tearing.

Oops - one more thing - I turned font smoothing style to "Light" in the system preferences, appearance dialog. Looks nice on LCDs IMO.

[riot]

Core Image: Not Supported
Quartz Extreme: Not Supported

thats why you arent getting mouse tearing anymore. your original install with the ATI probally had working drivers with CI and QE enabled, once you switched to the NVidia card and tried MacVidia drivers it disabled CI and QE cause that doesnt work with NVidia yet. so you could of just disabled CI and QE from the begining instead of doing all that non-sense.

please correct me if im wrong, but thats why AFAIK.

[nb1878]

Core Image: Not Supported
Quartz Extreme: Not Supported

thats why you arent getting mouse tearing anymore. your original install with the ATI probally had working drivers with CI and QE enabled, once you switched to the NVidia card and tried MacVidia drivers it disabled CI and QE cause that doesnt work with NVidia yet. so you could of just disabled CI and QE from the begining instead of doing all that non-sense.

please correct me if im wrong, but thats why AFAIK.

From the benchmarks and general feel, it's faster than the NVIDIA card. But I installed the ATI card and then 10.4.6 fresh, without the NVIDIA card and driver. So other than following instructions, I didn't do anything outside the norm.

From my understanding, the ATI cards suffered from mouse tearing in QE/non-QE mode. Or do ATI cards just suffer from mouse tearing in QE mode only?

[xtraa]

The mousetearing will disappear with no CI or/and no QE. You can check it easy if you click on the info symbol of any widget. If they don't flip around with a graphic effect, the acceleration is gone.

[cyclonefr]

QE/CI with no framebuffer loaded (ie atindrv) causes mouse tearing.

No 3D Acceleration, ie no QE/CI and no framebffer loaded = no mouse tearing, but no 3D acceleration. Try to play 3D games, or play a divx, your CPU will suffer at the point of playing the video slowly...

[poplars]

lol...you crack me up man...