Wednesday, January 31, 2007 |
09:56 - Help On the Way for Google Earthenoids
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/776811/page/0/vc/1
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This will only be of interest to those people whose souls, like mine, are pledged eternally at the altar of Google Earth. (Every day I'm reminded that such people are inexplicably few; on a ski trip this past weekend, the friends in the car were all talking about the Internet resources that suck up all their time—Wikipedia, Second Life, etc. When I mentioned Google Earth, they sort of looked at me blankly and said they'd never really found it useful. Useful? Useful?! Are you kidding me? High-res overflight-type views of any place on the entire planet, with overlaid roads and labels and placemarks linking you to Wikipedia pages so you can research the history of any town or place you run into while following along with a road trip journal or a travelogue or a historical novel, and it's not useful?! Haven't you ever wanted to follow the headwaters of the Missouri River up Hell Roaring Canyon up to the peak on the Continental Divide on the Idaho/Montana border where it begins? Gaah! What is wrong with you people?)
...Anyway. Aside from wonky interface issues, one big problem that Google Earth 4 has (versus 3) is that it's very, very slow. Whereas GE3 on my dual G5 is smooth as butter no matter how rugged the terrain you're looking at, GE4 is stuttery and laggy. Everybody's been noticing this, and posting on the Keyhole BBS to that effect, but having very little luck getting anyone at Google to acknowledge it.
Well, finally we get signal:
This is a known problem with GE 4/Mac, and is due to a problem with the MacOS X kernel. The problem has been reported to Apple and is fixed in 10.5 (Leopard). Intel Macs running 10.4.8 have been reported to work as well.
The root cause is that minor changes in graphics access patterns can have disproportionately large impacts on performance. GE 3 "got lucky" in that it avoided triggering the problem most of the time (but not all), however the GE 4 renderer is significantly different internally and reveals the issue more often.
We are investigating workarounds for PPC Macs, however the underlying fault is in code outside our control. For now we recommend sticking with GE 3 if you are affected.
Hooray! I can totally wait for Leopard if that's what's got to happen. Certainly it'd be less expensive than buying, like, a new Mac Pro (or a PC) just for my Google Earthing...
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