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Perhaps XGL is what Apple is looking for.


Adrian Fogge
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After playing around with Leopard, I cant help but think that for the most part it is last year's left overs with some new seasoning to cover the bitter aftertaste.

 

Don't get me wrong, Leopard has some real potential, but OS X has always stood apart as being a truly intuitive, rock hard OS full of over the top completely useless eye candy.

 

Now that Microsoft has jumped on that band wagon with Vista, maybe Apple should go a little further with their contribution to Open Source projects so that aspects of the new Linux XGL graphical subsystem could be used in Leopard.

 

For those who havent seen, XGL is an enhancement pioneered by Novell to have complete window deformations and animations as well as provide a complete graphical user interface that uses solely the User's graphics card (no offloading to the CPU or system memory under any circumstances).

 

Even with Leopard, if you were to queue up a few <Shift>[Expose'] operations, you can see your CPU Utilization go through the roof even with final generation PPC systems like the Powerbook G4 17" which has the ATI Mobile 9700 Pro with 128MB of DDR2 Graphics memory.

 

Under XGL and a Linux Installation, you can do the exact same things as Expose' including the <Shift> modifier to slow everything down, with some truly over the top animations (like having the windows bounce backwards a touch when going into Expose') while having your CPU utilization remain continuously around 1-2 %.

 

What I am getting at is OS X does not necissarily need window deformations while moving something, but the core technologies that Novell has implemented into XGL and then have been expanded upon greatly by the Open Source community is without a doubt what Apple has been looking for to set them apart from Microsoft in 2007.

 

Even with the latest Vista build that just came out yesterday, Aero is taking up 12% of a 2.8 GHz CPU to have 4 windows open (Notepad, Paint, Computer & Control Panel).

When Aqua is doing it's fancy effects, one can expect to see round about that on a PPC.

 

If Apple can position themselves to create a truly beautiful, over the top UI while not using a substantial amount of system resources in the process, then they will be in a far stronger and better position against Microsoft because people can have an interesting and visually appealing UI without having to sacrifice their performance in the process.

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Actually, XGL is just a pre-alpha and the devs think it will eventually morph into a totally different type of rendering engine. What most XGL users don't realize is the devs are creating the desktop of the future. Maybe a year or two from now, we'll know where it is headed and I also think it will be much more user friendly. now lets get on ATI and nVidia's @sses on developing better drivers or release source codes to open projects. I think Apple can come up with a better interface between now and 2008.

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what does macos need to be like XGL? lemme think... almost nothing.

 

both quartz and xgl are using 3D surfaces to draw the desktop thru the hardware, and all the apps are indirectly accelerated.

both are able of true transparencies

they are very similar technologies after all

 

the cube effect just maps 4 different desktops in textures nothing more

linux itself manages the four desktop indeed

macos just needs a multi-desktop management.. that's it

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Lord Muad, if you would have read beyond the title you would know.

 

I said that what XGL currently gives is complete GPU accelerated user interfaces, even if you are not using 3D content such as the Decorator or other Morphing extensions for your GUI.

 

What it means is that nothing is EVER sent to your CPU. If it can not do something in real time, then it scales back the visual quality of an effect to make it work in real time.

 

I specifically said that Apple should be looking at simmilar technologies to what was implemented in XGL to make their user interfaces require significantly less resources (try using drop shadows on a G3 under OS X and see WindowServer take up a substantial amount of your CPU).

 

Rather than creating a system that outright crawls, create an adaptive rendering system that determines what your hardware is capable of and gives you just what it can handle.

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I think every major designer of interfaces today looks eagerly at XGL. It has tremendous possibilities, and really paves the road to the future (as said, using the GPU for graphics isn't such a bad idea :) ). I am quite sure people at the Apple R&D Department are wachting this as well. Perhaps Leopard will ship with modular Xorg, we shall see...

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The Quartz Extreme packages say that "If there is a sufficiently powerful graphics card, I will begin offloading UI effects to the graphics card. It the Graphics card cant handle everything, then I will send the remainder to the CPU to make sure that everything looks super pretty (may not be very speedy though)."

 

What XGL (the rendering engine, rather than Compiz, the effects engine) does is that "If there is a sufficiently powerful graphics card, I will offload everything UI related to the graphics card. If the graphics card cant handle what I am giving it, I will tell the graphics card to sacrifice anti-aliasing and texture maping quality to maintain performance. Nothing UI related will ever be sent to the CPU under any circumstances."

 

So, it means that everyone across the board will have high performance, using their graphics card to handle graphics rather than needing their CPU to do the heavy lifting.

 

Then, if someone were to want to have the effects that they have come to expect from OS X (lets forget about compiz for a second), then they will have them, very speedy on EVERY graphics card ever made, however will lack anti-aliasing on the Rolling print window effect, Genie Effect or Cube Effect. However, the UI on a G3 will still run as fast as it does on the highest end MacPro with every single UI nuance.

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What XGL (the rendering engine, rather than Compiz, the effects engine) does is that "If there is a sufficiently powerful graphics card, I will offload everything UI related to the graphics card. If the graphics card cant handle what I am giving it, I will tell the graphics card to sacrifice anti-aliasing and texture maping quality to maintain performance. Nothing UI related will ever be sent to the CPU under any circumstances."

 

one word.. mesa? it's not xgl itself but it's the mesa software subsystem that is used if something is not supported

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