slow redraws

[Chris Morgan]

Installed PC 6.1.1 on G4 w/ 1 gig ram running 10.3.3 and I'm having trouble with very slow redraws. I could not find any help in searching this forum. Any ideas?

[JohnMorse]

Much more discussion of "slowness" can be found at the old forum. This post is probably a good starting place.

For what it's worth, I'm generally working at a satisfactory pace unless one of the following is involved:

1. Interactive hatches that cover more than, say, half of 1% of the drawing area.
2. "Exploded" former hatches that now have thousands upon thousands of objects (still faster than #1, though)
3. Large or High-Resolution bitmap images
4. Large PDFs placed in the drawing.
5. Wacky paint-bucket operations ongoing.

If any of the above are critical to your workpath, and you've tried all of the various means of speeding things up (turning quartz off, etc) then you will probably need to consider newer hardware or older software.[/url]

[ms]

Chris,

I struggled with it for a long time, as you are doing. Thee are lots of good suggestions, and don't forget the ESC key, which kills the redraw [albeit not instantly]. Think ahead about zoom levels, too, and your location in the drawing.

Ultimately, it is simple necessary to upgrade. And you will be astonished at how PC runs on a G5; you just will not even notice the redraw [a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but not much]. I tend to work on very large drawings, both physical size and in the number of layers and amount of data, and when I went to the faster box the change was truly astonishing.

I know it's not what you want to hear. People told me the same thing and it was very annoying but finally I gave in and found it to be true.

It is also worth mentioning that there are also many folks here happily using PCX on legacy gear. They can probably offer some tips.

Finally, as mentioned, there has been a lot of talk about this issue, and searching will find many other ideas.

ms

[rjpotter]

We are running Pcadd 6 on a variety of machines, the slowest being a Powerbook G3 400 with 310MB ram, the quickest being new G5s, and the majority being G4s.
Switching off quartz imaging is essential for any machine other than the G5s if you are a moderately fast draughtsman.
Scrolling can be speeded up considerably by changing the Line Scroll setting in Preferences to a higher figure (eg: 100).
Even with a G5 with 1.5GB ram, things don't feel as fast as PCadd 4 was, but the great advantage is the system stability of OSX, plus the various new features of PC6.

[cr]

There are some issues involved by turning off the Quartz imaging, one of the largest problems I noticed is that your pick handles do not appear correctly on the screen and you may notice that 2 of the 4 are missing, there are also a number of issues with text appearing incorrectly on the screen,

The issue probably has more to do with the video card than the speed of the computer itself. I've tried installing some new video cards in G4s in the past and it helps to an extent, but they were only PCI slot cards instead of AGP cards. Perhaps I might try taking the AGP card from one of my newer computers and placing it into an older G4 to see what happens. I know that if you have a Quartz Extreme compatible graphic card the redraw speed is much better. I find it runs very well on my PowerBook G4 with 64 MB of VRAM. But much better on a G5.


-Chris Roehl

[cr]

I think I am going to try putting an ATI Radeon 9000 AGP card into a 500 MHz PowerMac G4 and see what happens, I found the cost of those video cards are only $139. It has 128 MB VRAM It should give the Quartz Extreme support to the computer to substantially speed things up....I'll let you know what I find.

[rjpotter]

I wondered if I was being a bit hard on PC6 following the 6.1.1 update so I ran a few speed tests out of curiosity. Some machines were still running 6.0.6, so I was able to run a test, update to 6.1.1, and run the test again. The results clearly show that 6.1.1 is significantly faster at redraws, and that having transparency etc switched on no longer has a speed penalty.

All tests used the same file (32 layers with 22,267 objects).

Benchmark is PC2000 on a beige G3 266 with 320MB ram and OS 9.2.2:
2.5 seconds

All machines below running OS 10.3.4

G3 400 Powerbook with 320MB ram:
6.0.6
Quartz off 5 seconds
Quartz on 7 seconds
Transparency etc on 10 seconds
After 6.1.1 update
Quartz off 5 seconds
Quartz on 6 seconds
Transparency etc on 6 seconds

G5 1.6GHz 1.25 Gig ram
6.0.6
Quartz and transparency on 3 seconds
6.1.1
Quartz and transparency on 2 seconds

G5 2x1.8GHz 1.5 Gig ram
6.0.6
Quartz and transparency on 1.5 seconds
6.1.1
Quartz and transparency on Zero seconds (ie: instantaneous!).

For those of you still awake, the speed increase is fantastic. On older machines like my Powerbook G3 the speed is now acceptable, and there is nearly no penalty for using Quartz (other than sore eyes from the fuzzy appearance). On new G5s the redraw speed is amazing and is back to the days of PC4.

If engsw keep this up then we may not need to replace our older machines after all.

[cr]

I did install a Radeon 9000 Mac Edition card into one of our old G4 450 MHz models a few days ago and it made a very significant improvement on the redraw speed and corrected some other redraw related problems. It was a very easy inexpensive ($139) solution.


The Radeon 9000 Card is an AGP card that is fully supported by Quartz Extreme. It has 128 MB of Video RAM, plenty for a long time.

[John Cruet]