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After Effects Benchmarks - I spent a couple of weeks trying to come up with a portable benchmark test that I felt would better test all of the resources of a system, not just its ability to calculate fractal noise (although there is certainly some fractal noise involved in my project as well). Here is my strategy for creating the benchmark

Lies, damned lies and benchmarks - So the questions remain: is the published score artificially high from using a compiler that is known to produce highly optimised SPEC code or can Apple be accused of hobbling the Dell machines to give artificially low results? Should Apple have waited until IBM ported its highly optimised compilers to the platform before running this test for a fair comparison with the Intel ones? No matter what the answers, the inescapable conclusion is that the entire concept of benchmarks is flawed when results are so reliant on the software chosen to create the machine code. It’s like an Olympics in which there is no drug testing and athletes are allowed to do almost anything to win. You get results, but they have so many caveats that they’re essentially meaningless for real world application.

G5 Power Mac Versus OTHERS - I know you're dying to know how the G5 compares to other machines. I've combined my 7 test results with 3 from my "remote mad scientists" (from as far away as Australia). These Cinebench 2003 results are just the beginning. In the near future I'll have results for Photoshop 7, Bryce 5, Unreal Tournament 2003, Quake3, and other cross platform applications

Just what is the fastest? - Others howled that Apple must have rigged the tests -- even though they were done by an independent outfit. Microprocessor Watch, perhaps the most respected technical publication for the microprocessor industry, has weighed in with an analysis of Apple's claims. The verdict of senior editor Peter Glaskowsky: Apple's PowerPC G5 processors have transformed the Mac platform into a "viable competitor" to today's fastest PCs

Power Mac G5 vs Windows PCs 3D Gaming - Though the G5 has gained ground, the Pentium 4 still dominates in almost all 3D HW accelerated games . And I'm sure the newer 3.2GHz P4 does even better

Power Mac G4 and G5 versus Pentium 4, Dual Xeon, and Dual Athlon - Welcome to the popular Mac vs PC desktop shootout

Benchmarks to Convince Pundits that Macs are Faster - In a flurry of articles, writers across the Web are finding issue with the recently released benchmarks for Apple's new Power Mac G5 .I've read all of these (ignoring all the parts too technical for a mere Mac user to understand) and come up with a summary of all the things Apple would have to do to prove to the Wintel world that Macs are truly faster. Apparently, double the speed on Quake, Photoshop, and Mathematica just isn't enough; when you're in the minority, you have to do everything twice a good just to stay even in the game . . . uh, wait a minute

G5 - PC "Bake-Off" for Audio Dubious - MacMusic picks apart the test and Apple’s white paper on G5 performance . One of their primary concerns revolves around the statement in the white paper that, of five plug-ins chosen for each platform, Cubase got an “equalizer and default settings for StepFilter, Chorus, Compressor plug-ins,” which the MacMusic author takes to mean any equalizer—and possibly an extremely CPU-intensive one—may have been used. This is sloppy writing without question, though it doesn’t necessarily mean Apple didn’t just use the default Steinberg EQ or something similar

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Real-World Apps Are Better Tests - Apple started the futile benchmark war with the introduction of the G5 on Monday, with the now infamous slogan: The World’s Fastest Personal Computer. Over the past four days the SPEC numbers that Apple used to prove its point that the G5 is the world’s fastest personal computer were diced, sliced and minced to try and prove that Apple lied about the tests and therefore .... therefore .... well therefore, there is no conclusion. See Apple may have been caught fudging the PC machines, and also optimizing their own, but its common knowledge in the computer industry that, EVERY ONE DOES THIS

Which Computer Is More Powerful: Mac or PC? - Calculating computer performance is a tricky issue, and there are a variety of methods that attempt to do this. Most of these focus on very narrow tests, like floating-point calculations, etc. A major limitation of many of these tests is that they are actually more dependent on the software used in the test than the hardware of the computer itself. To date, there is NO industry standard measurement method that gives a real world indication for an average user as to which computer is faster or more powerful than an other

Power Mac versus Pentium 4 and Xeon 3D Gaming & Graphics - The fastest Pentium 4 system beats the fastest Power Mac G4 when doing graphics intensive 3D functions. With sophisticated games becoming available first for the PC, and sometimes ONLY on the PC, it's hard to argue that the hard core gamer should give up his water cooled, rip-roaring, custom built P4 for a Mac G4. The Pentium 4 was much faster than the Xeon on all the above tests. We tried it with and without hyper-threading enabled. In the case of Quake3, the best results were achieved by enabling hyper-threading and setting r_smp to 0

The Real Megahertz Myth: Is Apple The Real Slim Shady? - Basically, the P3 system spanked the G4. On the PC, scrolling and navigating through Word is instantaneous; scrolling redraw on the PC appears to move text lightly into view as if it were etched on a slab of granite. Conversely, the Mac's display/redraw feels, relatively, like you're manipulating it through molasses when you try live scrolling, particularly under heavy loads. Aqua is an appropriate moniker in this regard; when I grab the scroller and drag it, the screen updates in waves and splashes. I observed a similar performance differential when resizing windows; however, Aqua uses a far better redraw technique, which does not cause redraw "blitter" evident in Windows. Worse yet, OS X multitasking is more painful. If I play iTunes, run LimeWire, run QuickTime, and run Word on the Mac, the system becomes unresponsive. It's like I'm trying to perform brain surgery with mops tied to my hands

Mac3D: 3D User Talks about Mac Dual G4 Performance vs Dual AMD Machine - I thought you may be able to do some good with this information. I just completed a rendering on a project and found using Lightwave 3D 7.5. I was given 2 Top line(apparently) Dual 2Ghz AMD machines with 2GB of ECC Ram. I also used a Dual 1.25Ghz Mac with 1.5GB ram. I kid you not about this. On the same frame the Mac took 6 minutes, where as the PC took 16 minutes. They were both set up exactly the same with 2 threads, 100MB of Segment memory and optimized when rendering. I am thinking of doing some more tests if I can get a 1.4 [dual] Mac and Pitching it against other machines. I intend to document these tests

Mac OS X vs. Windows XP vs. Linux - Although graphics performance is, of course, more strictly related to hardware than software, there is no doubt that the fancy 3-D shadows and alpha-blended eye candy of Mac OS X carries an impact. Indeed, a recent article in Wired News entitled "Why Do New iMacs Surf So Slowly?" notes that the sluggish graphical user interface of OS X makes an $1800 iMac surf the Web more slowly than an older $400 PC running Windows

Apple rejects Adobe speed claims - 'I find it odd that Adobe should publish something that many of its Mac customers might find offensive, seeing as it how it suggests we chose the wrong platform,' said Jon Bertman, a London-based digital video editor and Mac user. Apple was also quick to issue a prompt rebuttal of Adobe's assertions. 'Apple stands by our claims that our latest Power Mac systems perform equal to or better than competing PC systems,' said the company in a statemen

Performance Preferred - Let's face it: Software development, for the most part, isn't all that it can be. Recently Adobe inadvertently underscored this problem when it posted an article on its site (using data taken from benchmark studies conducted by DMN's own Charlie White), showing how a single-processor 3.06 GHz Dell Precision Workstation dramatically outperformed a similarly equipped dual-processor 1.25 GHz Macintosh G4 at rendering compositions in After Effects 5.5. So what's the problem? Software that isn't written to take advantage of the hardware. That's a big problem

Adobe's New pcprefered Page Authored by Longtime Anti-Mac PC Apologist - Although Adobe's pcprefered page garnered an infinite number of mixed opinions throughout the web, one thing that concerns me about the report is that it was authored by PC apologist Charlie White. Anyone that has followed Mr. White's Mac vs. PC comparisons in the past, is undoubtedly aware of his affection for IBM compatible computes and the fact that he loathes the Macintosh and works hard to discredit Apple's product offerings at every corner

Adobe and the Great Benchmark Hissy Fit - So what's going on here? Apple touts Adobe software as demonstrating that the Power Mac smokes a Pentium. The latest benchmarks show, for example, that the dual 1.42GHz Power Mac is 32% faster than a 3GHz Pentium 4. Now we're reading about a test showing a decidedly contrary result. Is Apple publishing rigged tests because its processors can't keep up with Intel Inside? Let's give this whole episode a serious dose of reality. The article Adobe is linking to is old news. It was published last fall in Digital Producer Magazine, in fact. Why has it suddenly become such an issue? Well, first and foremost, the whole subject of benchmarks is like statistics. You can always produce figures that prove your point of view, if you are reasonably selective

Dell beats Apple in Adobe speed tests - A Dell PC has soundly beaten a Power Mac in a series of speed tests of Adobe applications. The tests were carried out by Digital Producer Magazine, but the results have been reproduced by Adobe on a Web page entitled, ominously, as 'pcpreferred'

 Mac Gaming - or Crazy Mac Switchin' Part 2: Electric Boogaloo - A lot of Windows users think the Mac is a piece of crap when it comes to gaming. They say there are no games for the Mac OS, or that you can't upgrade Macs, or that they're slow. Most of this is just ignorance spouting from the mouths of the uninformed, and I'm here to hopefully shed a little light on the subject

OS Shootout: Mac OS X vs. Windows XP - This shootout is narrowly focused on usability for creative professionals, so its conclusions may not be true in other work environments. For instance, corporate employees have very different requirements for what makes a useful computer than web or video designers. Furthermore, this shootout only considers preinstalled and free (by the manufacturer) applications, and I think it's fair to say that everybody loads up their computer with commercial, shareware and freeware apps that extend the computers basic functionality. I wouldn't be so bold as to try to compare X vs. XP in terms of every possible combination of software on the market.

Windows, Macs, OS X, and Real World Performance - Windows users with little Macintosh experience often say that the Mac "feels slow." They find that starting up the computer, opening applications, browsing the Internet, copying and moving files, and other simple tasks feel slower than on their Windows PC

Power Mac Dual G4 versus Pentium 4 and Dual Xeon - This is a "remake" of our popular Mac vs PC page. Thanks to my new best friend, Peter Ashford, I was able to test not only his custom built Pentium 4, but also his custom built Dual Xeon. That should make some of you happier who felt the Xeon was slighted. I, of course, provided the fastest Power Macintosh G4 available

Battle of the computer benchmarks - When I compared a Power Macintosh G4 with dual one-gigahertz processors with a Sony VAIO in last week's column, I had a very modest goal, and that was to demonstrate that having the highest CPU clock speed doesn't necessarily mean you have the fastest computer. Sure enough, the Mac scored top marks when performing nine tasks in an image-editing application, Adobe Photoshop. The rest of the results were mixed. The Mac was faster at some functions, slower at others, but was undeniably a fast computer

Benchmark Duel: Mac vs. PC, Round II - In our first round of head-to-head Mac vs. PC testing, we pitted a dual Athlon 1800+MP machine against a Mac dual 1GHz G4 using six Adobe After Effects benchmarks that tested all kinds of capabilities. For round two, by popular demand, we now compare a single-processor Dell Precision Workstation 320 with a 2.53GHz chip to the Dual 1GHz Mac, and also to the fastest machine we've tested here so far, a dual Athlon 2000+MP machine by BOXX. And we'll be testing all three machines using not only After Effects 5.5 benchmarks, but Adobe Photoshop 7.0 benchmarks as well. So which machine came out ahead?