Success Story - Intel D865GLC - Maxtor 80GB IDE - 1 GB MEM - ATI PowerColor 9600 PRO - Minimal Mouse Tearing

[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:

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

<string>IONDRVFramebuffer</string>

to

<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

sudo su -

To get a root shell. Then, I did a

kextstat

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

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.

 

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...