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First off, the good news...I finally got a working install of OS X! I used SABR's VMWare -> Native guide with the Myzar 10.4.4/10.4.5 ISO and things went pretty smoothly. My hardware is a Sempron 2800+ (SSE2) on a KT800 chipset, so not the most OS X friendly platform.

 

Anyway, my current issue is what I would call "window tearing." When you drag a window around the desktop, the edges visably tear, similar to vsync off settings in games. Is this what people call "mouse tearing?" I always imagined that to be tearing of the mouse pointer. Also, scrolling webpages is kind of jerky (smooth scrolling is off). Overall UI responsiveness is not bad, but I feel it could be better.

 

My video card is a Geforce4 ti4200 64MB. I'm using the Macvidia drivers v1.0.8 (which I needed to get the resolution out of 1024x768 to match my LCD's 1280x1024) and the AGPGart fix. Here are my XBench graphics scores:

 

Quartz Graphics Test 24.71

Line 23.74 1.58 Klines/sec [50% alpha]

Rectangle 16.16 4.83 Krects/sec [50% alpha]

Circle 18.58 1.51 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]

Bezier 54.23 1.37 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]

Text 38.38 2.40 Kchars/sec

User Interface Test 21.18

Elements 21.18 97.19 refresh/sec

 

The OpenGL tests didn't seem to work. System Profiler detects the card as AGP, while before AGPGart it was PCI. I'm on the "Millions" color setting, but I do notice significant diagonal cross-hatched dithering. No banding, just dithering.

 

I'm also not able to actually affect the refresh rate through System Preferences -> Displays. Switching between 60, 75, and 85 Hz somehow keeps things at 60 Hz. My monitor only supports up to 75 Hz. I almost wonder if the tearing is a result of a mismatch between refresh rates? I.E., the monitor/card is locked at 60 Hz, but OS X is trying to draw at a different rate.

 

Any suggestions? Should I try ditching Macvidia? If so, how can I get the native drivers working?

Well, I tried that out, and at least you've confirmed for me that its not mouse tearing. :)

 

I guess I probably had a bit of mouse tearing, too, but the symptom I'm most concerned about is something else altogether.

 

I think I'm going to try uninstalling the Macvidia drivers next.

OK, with Macvidia gone, the window tearing effect remains, but the annoying dithering is gone. I wonder if this is just the state of things when hardware acceleration is disabled (VESA mode)?

 

For future reference, I got around the resolution issue by adding the following to my boot.plist:

 

<key>Graphics Mode</key>

<string>1280x1024x32@60</string>

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