If I am working on several applications on a Macintosh, do the positions of the windows, in front or back, or full screen or not, make a difference on how much the processor is devoted to that application?
ie if I move a window to the front, or make it full screen, will my video processing go faster?
Ray, I’m not an internals expert but I DO NOT believe general processing speed is dependent as to whether the window for the app is front most, rear most, hidden, fullscreen or whatever. That being said, I have always been of the opinion that hiding the window of an app thats processing, IF it is updating that window, may give an infintesimal performance boost only from the standpoint that if the window is not displayed, the routines that update the window should not be doing anything, but I do not know if that is true, and suspect the savings in cycles is, as I said, would be infintesimal.
Someone with more knowledge on this subject should feel free to override my opinions with facts.
I’m hesitant to answer this definitively since different apps may do different things depending on what’s visible. Safari, for instance, can, I believe, suspend tabs (and presumably windows) that aren’t visible. But in general, if you’re concerned about something reducing performance for other apps, you should check Activity Monitor and watch its CPU and Memory tabs.