Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Speed Tests Revisited--Quartz Graphics Update

Monday's "How Fast Is It?" article on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger showed that Tiger's 2D Quartz graphics tested much slower using Xbench than with 10.3.9 Panther on three of five computers: dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5, 1.25GHz G4 Mac mini and 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4. We speculated that Xbench's Quartz graphics test may need to be updated for Apple's new Quartz 2D Extreme graphics engine.

Well, no. Reader Chris Adams pointed out an Ars Technica article by John Siracusa that states that the default setting in Tiger's new Quartz 2D Extreme technology is OFF! It's hard to believe that but this is what the author had to say:

"There's one final barrier to hardware-accelerated bliss. Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default in Mac OS X 10.4.0. That's right, the whiz-bang new technology you just read all about is not actually used in Tiger unless it's explicitly enabled using the Quartz Debug application. Even then, it only applies to applications that are launched after it was turned on. It also appears that Q2DE is re-disabled when you quit the Quartz Debug application."

"Why develop something as impressive as Quartz 2D Extreme and then leave it turned off by default? My inquiries to Apple have gone unanswered, so I can only speculate about the reasoning behind this decision. My best guess is that all of the bugs could not be excised from Q2DE in time for Tiger's launch date, and that it will be enabled by default in a subsequent update—perhaps as early as version 10.4.1."

We located the application Quartz Debug in the Xcode 2.0 performance tools folder, enabled Quartz 2D Extreme and re-ran our Xbench Quartz and User Interface speed tests on the three Macs that showed a decrease in Quartz performance between Mac OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4. Here are the results: