What means "working" for you?

[dripple]

What means "working" or even "fully working" for you?

 

Some weeks ago I discovered the possibility to install Mac OS X on a socalled "plain PC". Happy with this, I got a install DVD, the needed patches and after some days of playing around - and whiping some partitions including my windows xp, no loss - my PC boots into Mac OS X. As being a Mac User since the Classic running System 6.0.7 I felt comming home to loved place I ever wanted to be.

 

This forum was a great help to me. I'm technical oriented (working as a software developer) so I was able to confirm most of the information pieces and set up my box properly.

 

I was amzed how well my PC performs. It was equipped with an five year old Matrox Millienium G450. However. There's no QE and no CI. But do I really need that? Every applications runs fine. Okay. I had to change a setting for Pages (part of iWork). OpenGL didn't work to me, but this fine too. My Matrox doesn't support OpenGL...

 

What means "working"?

While reading the forum, I figured out that most of the ATI Cards seems to work on Mac OS X. So many poeple wrote "right out of the box" or something similar and I was thinking 'Hey, if I i put a supported card into my box, the overall performance should increase' So I bought an Radeon 9600 XT which seems to be the most supported card.

 

I changed my Matrox with the Radeon, boot my system and was happy again. Without any changes to the well known kext's, the proper ATI9700.kext was loaded. The System Profiler shows me what so many people want to get: QE and CI supported.

 

Okay, now I discovered those funny effects in my Dashboard (flipping widgets, the water effect and so on) and my Screensaver now works. Fine. Even fullscreen games work, but they are not allowed to change the resolution. But this mouse tearing. And the GUI was less responsibile than before. XBench proves my suspicions: the performance dropped down to a third!

 

 

Finally, what I want to ask is:

What means "working" to you?

 

 

My "supported" and "working" card

- has CI and QE supported

- allows the play of fullscreen OpenGL games.

- transparent windows are little smother

- Screensaver is working

- Dashboard has more effects

- Keynote is running

- DVD is recognizing my card

 

 

On the other hand, it

- is supported as PCI, not AGP. This results in a great loss of speed (no native AGP-bridge)

- slows the overall performance of the GUI (QE should INCREASE the speed)

- has bad mouse tearings. I have to use a third party tool a simple avoid the use of the mouse wheel with results in a loss of responsibility of the system.

- Java-based apps using the Carbon-Bridge wont work any more (and there a lot Java-based Apps out there!)

- Apples DVD drops frames even on a 50% sized window. Even VLC does a better job on my VESA 3.0 driver

 

 

For me, this means: the card ist "running", but not "working".

 

I change back to my VESA 3.0 based Matrox. I'll loose fullscreen support, but for daily use my system runs better with this card. No tearings. Better GUI performance and I'm able to use every app I wan't.

 

I'll wait for proper driver for my card, I think omni an np_ will do a great job.

 

 

So, what means "working" for you?

 

 

dripple

[A Nonny Moose]

"Working" to me means I can boot up the OS.

 

"Fully Working" means I can boot up the OS and run apps on it.