An ATI Radeon 9000 Upgrade on a Sawtooth

I'd long wondered how much of a speed boost a new graphics card would be on my Sawtooth over my old, decrepit Rage 128 Pro. Seriously, the thing was actually turning gray, and it wasn't just the dust covering it. So when thinking about a replacement, I'd mentally settled on an ATI 9000 with 64 MB of memory. Now there are reasons you wouldn't want a 9000 on a Sawtooth, namely the ADC port won't work. Unlike all later Power Macs, the motherboard doesn't supply the ADC port with power, so unless you have an (expensive) adapter for the DVI port, you can't use an ADC monitor. Also, dual monitors are a no-go. But since I don't have an ADC monitor and made this far through life never having the urge to have dual monitors, I figured the 9000 would be an ideal upgrade for me because of the modest cost and lack of a cooling fan. And if you've ever had a graphics card fan wear out on you, you know what I'm talking about. (One more note: Linux has quality drivers for ATI cards, not so much for Nvidia cards, so if I want to boot Linux on this machine I'm gonna want an ATI card.)

So after looking on and off for a few months, I saw a 9000 on ebay for $0.99 plus $8.00 shipping and won the auction as the lone bidder. I also had to get a DVI to VGA adapter since my monitor is VGA, and that was it's own kind of adventure. Long story shorter, you need a DVI-I adapter, not a DVI-D adapter, which are sometimes referred to as DVI(24+1) as opposed to the DVI-Is which are sometimes referred to as DVI(24+5). Got all that? Now back to the 9000.

So I got all the stuff in the mail and installed the new card and fired it up. So how was it? The first thing I noticed was the mouse cursor now had a subtle shadow around it that wasn't rendered with the Rage 128 Pro. Then I did some speed tests on tasks that involved graphics and video and was pleasantly surprised at the results.

First I tried out an abandonware flight sim I like called OSX Skyfighters 1945. On an 800 X 600 resolution, frame rates were about 15% faster. Not a huge deal, but on a 1024 X 768 resolution, frame rates improved by about 35%. Video playback on vlc and mplayer was about 15% faster, and frame rates in the astronomy sim Celestia were between two and three times faster. Also, and I didn't expect this, frame rates in games played in Classic Mode improved as well.

Probably the most striking difference was with MacTubes. With the Rage 128 Pro, the videos would skip frames when displayed at 200% and stuttered in full screen to the point of being not very watchable. Now with the 9000 that's all gone. There's no frame skipping, not even in fullscreen. So now I'm watching fullscreen youtube videos on an eleven year old computer and having the last laugh. You have not defeated me, youtube. You have not defeated me.

Unfortunately, though, and this was the only disappointment, flash playing in a web browser showed no improvement, and that was with Hardware Acceleration in the settings menu switched on and off. But flash is evil, so we'll ignore this.

So the lesson here? If you have an old Power Mac with a Rage 128 Pro or, god forbid, a GeForce 2MX, a graphics card might be a cheap and easy upgrade well worth your time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go watch MacTubes and make the 21st Century my bitch.

A Tour Through TenFourFox's about:config

One of the coolest things about Firefox has been its about:config feature and its near endless array of preferences. You simply type about:config in the address bar, and it's like the keys to the kingdom. Turns out TenFourFox is no different and even has a few custom preferences of its own, so I thought I'd take a brief tour through some of the settings with an eye on speed enhancements.

First, type about:config in the address bar and make the obligatory promises not to break stuff. Then find the following preferences:

javascript.options.tracejit.chrome

This is set to false by default. Double click on false which changes it to true, and you might notice the interface seems a little snappier.

browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting

When true, this raises the download manager window when a download starts. However, on my Sawtooth I noticed that blue animated progress bar takes about 20%-25% of my CPU, so rather than keep closing the window after it pops up, I just have it not open at all. I already have MenuMeters in my menubar telling me my network activity, so I already know something's downloading.

browser.tabs.animate

Don't want animated tabs slowing you down? Set this to false.

Speaking of tabs, here are a couple more:

browser.tabs.tabClipWidth

This clips the width of your tabs when you have too many open, but it also eliminates the close tab button from all tabs except the one focused. The default value is 140 pixels. I switched mine to 80, and now the close button remains visible on all tabs.

browser.allTabs.previews

Set this to true and click on the list all tabs button at the right end of the tab bar.

And one more:

image.animation_mode

Change the value to once. Then animations will only play once and won't loop and slow down your browsing.

There are also a few settings that are unique to TenFourFox. Just type tenfourfox in the filter bar and you'll see there are three for now. They have to do with disabling certain troublesome plug-in features, and the developer has promised there will be more settings unique to TenFourFox in the future.