MacIntel better? I'm highly skeptical
 

until recently, I have managed not to have any chair time with intel-based Macs. My set up at home consists of a Pismo and 2 G4 Mac Minis. I'm real happy with this rig.

A client of mine has me working on a Dual-Xeon Mac Pro with at least 2.5GB of RAM (might even be 4) and using mostly CS3 products to work on their print and web collateral.

I must say, I'm not impressed one bit by the performance of this Xeon-based Mac Pro — especially when considering the kind of dough it takes to buy one of these monsters and stuff it with enough RAM.

It doesn't feel any faster to me, and lots of things bog it down which I think it'd plow through like a hot knife thru butter...mainly InDesign Screen redraws where preview quality set to High on fairly small documents...1-4 pages.

Then there are wierd video/screen redraw issues like zooming in on a part of a page in indesign, then upon letting go of the magnifying glass key combo, I find that I've been zoomed in on a completely different part of the page!

This particular Mac receives very light use..it's not in heavy use (or any use) every day; I'm in just a couple days per week and doing things which I consider very light and easy, even for my G4 Minis.

Anybody else notice this? I know the "tech specs" and benchmark results indicate that the intel-based macs are flamethrowers, but...can't prove it by me.

thanks for any viewpoints or experiences..

gphz

my 8 core Mac Pro is very fast for CS3.... but I think Adobe apps have become soooooooooooooooo bloated over the past 10 years that it really shows...

CS4 is meant to be much faster as it utilizes the GPU, and CS5 should be faster still as it will be 64bit.

On the flip side of that... Cinema4D on my new MacPro is 20 or 30 times quicker than my old iMac G5... (i posted some un-official benchmarks on this site)

that is a fact!

and I personally feel trapped with no serious alternatives, and I think they realize that.

well, good to know that you are seeing real performance increases..I'll have to poke around for those Cinema benchmarks of yours..

gphz

I held out with my G4 and my Pismo for many years, satisfied and thinking they were just wonderful, but once I got my Mac Pro it was clear how old my G4 was, and once I got my MacBook Pro...well, I really hate to say this given how much I love my Pismo, but the Pismo is now shut down and in the closet. The PowerPC Macs can't even approach what these multicore Intel Macs can do. It wasn't until I got the Mac Pro that ripping my entire CD library to iTunes would take a reasonably short amount of time so I finally did that.

Now, I didn't have much problem running InDesign at High Quality display on my G4 PowerBook, and maybe that's part of the problem you're seeing: Adobe must have optimized InDesign very well for older hardware that the perceived difference was the least; it's one of the apps that still felt pretty good to me on the G4. It was other apps that made me feel like I had to upgrade. Where I really feel the pinch on the PPCs is converting raw camera files and processing audio and video. On those, no contest: The Intel multicore CPUs, even in the cheapest laptops, destroy the fastest PPCs you ever saw in Macs.

As others have commented, it seems that your issues are more with the software than the hardware. I don't work with graphics, so I can't really comment too much on that.

I do simulation work, very similar to what a render farm would do. The Mac Cluster that I have has 54 G5 DualProcessor Xserves and 40 Intel DualProcessorDualCore Xserves. The overall jobs that I do run for months. With our simulation, which has been fairly well optimized, what takes 7 hours on a G5, takes 5 hours on an Intel box. For our simulation, the Intel bit of the cluster can finish about twice as much work as the Intels.

The comment about software bloat seems extremely appropriate.

My wife originally trained to be a graphic artist in the early '90s. She doesn't do it anymore, but I remember that there were quite a few different applications to choose from. It doesn't seem to be quite like that anymore, just 1 or 2 big players and you are stuck with them. Oh well.

Brett

not so... depending on the apps you need... there are some blazingly quick real alternatives to Photoshop.... and Illustrator... but InDesign is tough to interact with... you could use Quark with one of those MarksWares plugins...

what apps do you use/need?


and brettgrant99... do you rent out your renderfarm?... I would love to see how fast you could render my Cinema4D work on 54 G5 DualProcessor Xserves and 40 Intel DualProcessorDualCore Xserves.. I suspect it would be quick :)

here is the benchmark thread :)
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...ial+benchmarks

would you mind sharing some titles of the ones you have in mind?

the other apps I use, I'm pretty happy with, such as Lightwave and Final Cut Pro.

We Lightwave users are waiting on an OS X-native version of that great app to be produced, and I assume that Final Cut Pro/Studio are about as OS X-native as OS X itself.

gphz

jeez... is Lightwave STILL not native....?!?!

sack them off and switch to Cinema4D here is an example of the results you could get... http://vogue-london.com/folio7.html (apologies for the website... it needs updating)

as for the other apps

Pixelmator.... like Photoshop... but fast!
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/25879/pixelmator

Inkscape..... like Illustrator....
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18954/inkscape

Sorry, no. And actually it is not a render farm, it is set up like a renderfarm, but we don't actually use it for rendering. Does cinema4d allow you to send jobs to other computers with xgrid or some other scheduling software?

Brett

yeh... the master machine and slave has the software on (NetRender) and the Master machine spots the slave(s) and uses them to render the job...

there are a number of people out there making good money by renting out computer grunt... RenderKing is one such company

So if you set up such a system all I would need is your IP, and all you would need is a license for NetRender... you could make a fortune :)

does Pixelmator require newer hardware for it to be fast? I d/l'd it onto the G4 and seemed kinda pokey, but maybe it's written for newer Mac iron than I have...

gphz

hmmnn... it flew on my old iMac G5.. and its crazy fast on my MP.... perhaps it is more geared towards Intel Macs... it uses your CPS and GPU... but the Mac Mini G4's were a bit underpowered on that score..

Skipping back to the beginning of this thread... perhaps you should wait till 10.6, Lightwave 10 and CS4 or CS5 before buying a new Mac...
I purposely held off upgrading to Intel for quite a while... I did the switch from 9 to X at the bleeding edge... and thought I would take a more leisurely pace this time :)

yeah, the minis I have are underpowered and do not support core image, which seems a requirement for these little photoshop killers..

I was thinkin about waiting 'til 10.6, but seems Apple has left PPC in the dust..I haven't upgraded to 10.5 bcs I didn't want to lose speed for more toys...I just assumed all emphasis is now on MacIntel and not PPC.

gphz

yeh... I think its heading that way...

My GF's company still has some 400mhz G4 Towers running in their production dept.. they run CS1/Quark6/Office/Mail all day long and never have any problems.... they are solid little Machines... and I suspect their software will make them redundant before they actually break...

either way... if you do upgrade you could turn your Mini's into a Lightwave render farm :)

which is what I do now! ;-)

if I did get a C2D mini or iMac, those G4 minis would be busy 24/7 until they go up in a puff of smoke doing renders for me.

I guess I'll have to wait to upgrade to see just how slow I am right now!

gphz

You have to remember that Apple hasn't even sold a PPC Mac in two years. It's understandable that the emphasis is on Intel.

People like to pile on Adobe for "bloat" but part of that "bloat" is what keeps them afloat on our old Macs. I mentioned earlier that InDesign still runs well on my G4. I noticed that Photoshop CS2 still ran on the Pismo, and I thought it was nice that it reached back that far. Now you have Pixelmator, lean and mean and CoreImage savvy, but what does that mean? It lacks any backwards compatibility, so you can't run on a Mac lacking a CoreImage card or Tiger. On my G4 or Pismo, forget it. Just like Aperture, which I could not run on my G4. Photoshop saves me again!

No company is a pure sinner or saint here, you get to decide where to draw your line, and in the process, you my find that the so called "bloated" app is actually your best friend because you didn't have to buy a new Mac to run it. And that best friend may be the app that is not the one all the Apple fanboys praise for its use of all the Apple buzzwords (Cocoa, CoreImage, etc). Pixelmator is teh awesome, but I use stuff in Photoshop that just doesn't exist in Pixelmator and may not for a long while.

well, those are some solid perspective, styrafome...I guess I just resent that apps continue to have ever-greater hardware requirements, and upgrading both isn't cheap. plus with clients wanting things to BE cheap, yet better, the little guy gets pinched...design and illustration have gotten commodified in a way that clients just want to buy their art in units of size, or of time, but not of quality.

"Art by the foot."

I was deliriously happy with Illustrator 7 and Photoshop 5? 6? they worked great and offered all the tools I wanted, but I guess that wasn't quite good enough.

so some 10 years later the whole thing looks to me like a money-slurping beast which wonders why it should keep MY pink buns around...


gphz

thats they key point for me... what would you have gained by updating from PS 5 to 6 to 7 to 8 to 9 to 10 ?..

in terms of features?... not a lot... in terms of speed? not a lot.. in terms of money....?! a hell of a lot!

I advise a number of design studio's on upgrading... they are all on CS1 or CS3 and I wont be advising an upgrade until CS5.. as for other apps... Cinema4D gets upgraded all the time as every update/upgrade brings massive improvements..

on a side note... you got any of your finished Lightwave renders you would care to post? I am always interested to see what other users can get out of other 3D Software..

The Power Mac G5 was the current selling tower configuration Mac until August 2006. So, 1 year and 10 months ago, Apple was still selling new Power Mac G5s.

If you include refurbished Power Mac G5s, I'm sure that Apple sold them even later than that.

Also, the Intel XServe didn't ship until November 2006 (although I'm not sure that Apple was still selling the XServe G5 after August 2006).

Trevor

^^ right, which is why I am staying put with some envy at you guys with the flamethrowers, but glad to have my $6K sittin in the bank. and unless some client starts demanding that I do a super 3D render in 5 minutes, I'm prbly ok.

Sure.. www.CoffeeOnMars.com

that's my website, and there's a 3D illustration link at the top menu. I have a few things up there (almost none of my "personal work" tho).

I haven't yet, but would like to begin, doing some architectural renders.

with these 2 Minis and some renderfarm controller software, I have a very versatile 3D rig.

gphz

nice work...

I cant sing Cinema4D's praises enough though... try the demo if you get a chance..

here is one of my more recent visuals... a bit thrown together ... but you get the idea... it took 2mins 15 secs to render at A4ish dimensions :)

I like the way you handle light, esp. incoming sunlight..

you find radiosity in C4D puts a big hurt on your render times? It does in LW...

gphz

well........ I use a Vray plugin which is much faster than most traditional built in renderers..

typically we find on Maya and C4D that using Vray improves the quality of the visual beyond belief AND more than halves the render time... so its better and quicker... :D

Okay over the years this is what I have noticed:

I mainly do a lot of graphics, desktop publishing, web design, etc using Quark and Adobe CS. Here is my simplistic digital assessment (I'm not a gamer or video editor):

I started with using a Mac Classic with a 7" screen in 1989, then went to a IIsi with a 13" monitor - WOW! But mainly because of the screen size and RAM increase. Going from OS 7 to OS 8 was an improvement, but not ground shaking.
Going from the 68000x processors to a G3 was also nice but again the 17"+ screen screen sizes made the most notable difference. Going from OS 8 to OS 9 hey, I believe we're on to something here!

Going from G3 to G4 and to OS X, the os transition was a little difficult but speed improvements were much improved, screen sizes bigger (Apple Cinema Displays also great!) - I LIKIE!!
The big jumped that I really noticed was from G4 (1.25GHz) to my G5 2.0 DP - FANTASTIC!! Almost everything seemed better, faster and smoother especially with Tiger.

From G5 DP/Quad to Mac Pro (Intel Xeon) with Leopard which I use at work, not really all that impressed with the performance differences. I also don't have the need for any Intel/Vista based applications at home so I'm still loving my Power Mac G5 DP.

Computer hardware gets faster cpus and bigger RAM and disk space. So the software engineers write new versions of the software to take advantage of the increase in power, RAM and disk space. So the net perception to the user is ..... no change.

I remember thinking how fast Photoshop was on my Mac IIsi, which had 8Mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive. My iMac is more than 100 times more powerful, but Photoshop still takes about the same amount of time to start up.:D

yeah..."new features" are what sells software.

how many would buy if the ads said "No new features, but lots of under-the-hood improvements to speed and stability."

I know I would but prlby lots of ppl would say "Meh...I'll stick with what I got."

and there's merit to that, too.

even the very first Mac did things hundreds or thousands of times faster than any human could do them...in one sense, we prbly should have stayed put...

gphz

Apple's trying that out right now. Leopard wasn't that exciting to many users, but a serious review like this one uncovered a vast amount of reworking of OS X under the hood to enable future major advances.

Now we have "Snow Leopard," which is being touted as no features, just optimization.

If the Mac computing public really wants performance and stability before feature bloat, everybody better pull out their credit cards for Leopard and Snow Leopard. If that doesn't happen, then the mainstream software marketers will have proved that no matter what the public said, they really wanted the flashy bloat features all along.

I was quite excited to hear about snow leopard and thot "Finally! someone's showing a little leadership here."

if I were to move to MacIntel, I'd be way happy about snow leopard, but Apple got it SO right with Tiger I'm quite happy to stay where I am.

gphz