PCI Extreme

[Mike Richardson]

I am having a heck of a time getting PCI Extreme/Quartz Extreme to work on a Beige G3 with a Radeon 7000 32 MB running Mac OS X 10.3.9.

I have tried just about everything. Quartz Extreme will simply not enable.

Anybody know anything? I'm at wits end.

 

[madmax_2069]

there are a few diffrent versions of PCI extreme. there is version 2.x and then there is version 3.x. the 2.x didnt work well on tiger and 3.x worked fine (for me anyway). you should try both versions of it.

if you are trying 2.x then you should try 3.x , if you are trying 3.x you should try 2.x

there is sometimes PCI extreme just will not enable, and sometimes it will enable but will hose the install to where you cant boot OS X up. or it will just work.

if you have tried both versions and its still not working. try installing tiger on it and then trying it.

when you open PCI extreme to enable it you press PCI and a dialog box pop's up saying it will open a terminal window and you have to enter your user password so it can edit a system file. you might not see anything being written down but it is and once its done it will reboot or ask you to reboot.

on tiger it has always worked when i enabled it. most Mac's are not the same when it comes to getting some stuff to work on them. have you seen if permissions need to be repaired before you try to enable it.

just trying to see what is happening or what isn't happening. there has to be a reason its not allowing to be enabled.

 

[alk]

You could also try to enable it manually. The directions on are the web - just Google it up.

For the most part, I don't bother with QE on PCI video cards. There is a reason it is disabled by default - it requires a lot of PCI bandwidth, and that can be detrimental to overall system performance and stability.

In fact, I have yet to find a situation where QE has enhanced my productivity or made it easier to use my Mac...

Peace,

Drew

 

[Mike Richardson]

I have tried enabling it manually, no luck. It works great on my 7300 running jaguar. It just wont work on this beige g3. It helped a lot on the 7300 so I think it would also help on a beige g3.

 

[madmax_2069]

i don't know why its such a PITA on a Beige G3 to get PCI extreme enabled for most (maybe its cause xpostfacto) or maybe its cause you are using panther i know that panther had issues with radeon cards (something to do with the driver) and that can be what is happening. have you tried to use a driver from ATI and then try to enable PCI extreme???

i didn't have any problems at all getting it enabled in tiger. i seen a huge performance gain when i enabled it. VLC play's allot better. i can encode a youtube video using tubesock and watching VLC with no difference in performance in video wile surfing on the web if something comes up. i have yet to have any issues with having PCI extreme enabled.

i can have allot of windows open and performance don't decrease. i have no ideal why PCI extreme runs so great on my system, and others either cant get it enabled or run into performance problems with having it enabled.

but i will take it cause it works good. the only thing i have a performance problem with is safari's scroll speed when flash is on a site. or playing a simple flash game. but that happens with or without PCI extreme enabled. makes no difference what so ever. so its nothing that having PCI extreme enabled or disabled will help

 

[alk]

but i will take it cause it works good. the only thing i have a performance problem with is safari's scroll speed when flash is on a site. or playing a simple flash game. but that happens with or without PCI extreme enabled. makes no difference what so ever. so its nothing that having PCI extreme enabled or disabled will help

Yeah, that's Safari sucking for you. We all have the same problem. Safari's flash engine (whatever it is) really bites and uses huge amounts of CPU time. It's frustrating especially when the PCs of about the same vintage don't suck wind nearly as much when playing flash media.

I'm curious about your usage of QE, though. Have you done performance appraisals with and without QE in VLC? In general, I find my machine to process faster with QE disabled but to _seem_ faster (but really isn't) with QE enabled because things like moving windows, minimizing, or drawing menus seem more fluid when rendered with QE.

Peace,

Drew

 

[madmax_2069]

with QE enabled movies in VLC get a 5-10FPS boost. video's that played good without QE enabled play smooth. now without QE enabled some video's the video would play then would just pause like i hit the pause button, when i would hit the pause button when this happens and press play again the video will play a bit more than pause again. with QE enabled i run into that allot less. i think it has to do with VLC and its decoders not being tweaked enough. it has got faster in the new version (at least they are moving in the proper direction)

yea that is a make or break point in a way about flash on Mac cause i have a P1 200mhz system running 98SE that will play flash better than my Mac at over twice the speed the PC is. i hate that a simple flash game makes the system seem like its a real slow system when its not.