How to determine if enabling Quartz 2D Extreme will work on my Mac?

Asked by robmandu (21334

) June 19th, 2008

Okay, so I saw that (annoying) Chris Pirillo video where he talks about disabling Beamsync and enabling Quartz 2D Extreme to see significant performance improvement.

From what I picked up, sounds like the Quartz bit is only useful for certain video cards… but I don’t know which. I’ve got the old “sunflower” style iMac G4 800 MHz and its running 10.5.3.

The specific commands I found here (be sure to scroll way down to find the correct syntax including “boolean”).

Of course, I’m worried the thing won’t boot (or the video will be blank) if I try this in the blind. Yes, I will have a bootable clone ready when the time comes.

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6 Answers

i’m sure you already checked here, but just in case, maybe this will give you some info

iwamoto (5277

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Thanks, @iwa! No, I had not. And yes, my NVIDIA GeForce2 MX does indeed support that.

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And so glad sitting thru that agonizingly painful Pirillo will actually pay off.

robmandu (21334

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aah, glad i could be at help, see, i knew it was there, just never knew if i’d ever need that piece of info, so kids, always pay attention and become a big man like iwa!

iwamoto (5277

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And bingo! It seems to have worked.

Thanks again, @iwa!

robmandu (21334

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you’re welcome man, i’m glad i could be of help, so is it activated as a standard in OS 10.5 ?

iwamoto (5277

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No, well… Quartz 2D Extreme is OFF by default in 10.5.3 and, based on my research, in older versions, too.

And the BeamSync is ON by default. Since BeamSync really is only for CRTs, that’s pretty bizarre. Apple doesn’t even sell a CRT, and hasn’t for years.

robmandu (21334

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