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Limited Rage Pro Support Added in Mac OS 10.1.5


With Mac OS X 10.1.5, my Lombard PowerBook G3 (bronze pre-FireWire) now, for the first time, shows some hardware acceleration that makes menus, scrolling, QuickTime playback and other operations much more useable, almost as good as Mac OS 9. Browser scrolling (IE and Chimera) is still sluggish, and 3D is still not accelerated. But hopefully those things will improve later.

This is a welcome change in Apple’s position: they had previously stated that our Macs were supported in Mac OS X, but not our built-in video boards! Similarly affected Macs include early iMacs and iBooks, as recently as 2000. (Rage Pro is NOT the same as Rage 128 Pro, which was always supported. And Rage II owners apparently see no improvement.)

The big catch: the improvements only seem to happen if you run Thousands of colors. Mac OS 9 can handle Millions on our systems, but it looks like Mac OS X can’t at useable speeds. Still, it’s a nice step.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.