*Have* a G3 Powerbook...

[Karlos]

I dunno how they compare in hardware terms but OSX (10.2) was a total pain on the old 400MHz G3 iMac thing I had to use at work before.

[Karlos]

odin wrote:
Hmmm, but aren't you a bit prejudiced being the world's biggest mac-hater? ;-).

Seems to be a reputation I'm getting :lol:

Seriously though, was this MHz related or more a matter of (RAM)size?

I reckon the RAM size personally, 128MB only. A quick look at top in the bash console showed the system was hitting the VM a lot once you start doing anything.

However, the user interface was quite heavy going on that machine, which didn't have the greatest GPU / VRAM resources ever. Seeing 10.3 on a G4 with a 32MB video card was startling in comparison.

[Karlos]

adz wrote:

odin wrote:

Is OS X very tweakable in the sense that graphical hoohaa can be turned off to make is speedier/less hungry for memory?

You best wait for Karlos to respond to that one :lol:

If you are prepared to get into the plists and edit them, you can reduce the eye candy a little, but it makes no real difference. There are lots of nice 3rd party skins available however, but this doesn't really solve the main issue.

OSX relies on quartz extreme for the GUI rendering. This in turn uses OpenGL and each window's surface is effectively a texturemap applied to a rectangle.

If you have a 32-bit 1024x768 display, a few open windows will quickly consume all the available resources and things start paging in and out of normal memory.

If your graphics hardware is not so hot (as in the case of the old iMac), it struggles a lot. Quite good fun with the expose feature. I presently have 3 bbedit windows and 2 firefox windows open here on this eMac. Expose basically jerks the windows out of view unless I close a few.

Unfortunately, you really don't have much option to reduce the amount it hammers the video hardware since it is fundamentally down to the way it works. You need video ram (texture memory especially) and lots of it for 10.3 to work well IMHO.