article: is your Mac fast enough?
- Thread starter Randman
- Start date
Arden
Where mah "any" keys at?
You can get the beachball (or Aqua watch, on my computer 
) for any number of reasons. A program could be processing, or it could be frozen, or it could be loading. In any case, you can switch to something else while this occurs (unless you need to kill it, of course) and wait for the beachball to, um, bounce away in that program.
Lycander, what song is your signature from?
) for any number of reasons. A program could be processing, or it could be frozen, or it could be loading. In any case, you can switch to something else while this occurs (unless you need to kill it, of course) and wait for the beachball to, um, bounce away in that program.Lycander, what song is your signature from?
What do you mean: Which is faster? I get my work done faster on a Mac, anytime. Not because I'm used to work with the Mac more than I am with Windows, but because it lets me handle files faster. I've had several PCs and Macs (and always used both concurrently), but have always switched back to the Mac soon when I tried to actually get some work done.
I am extremely demanding of my Macs. I was a very big vocal critic of Jaguar and its so-called Quartz Extreme (what a slap in the face that was). I was also a big vocal critic of Altivec in general and its massive overhype (I spent several weeks tabulating data and trust me, Altivec ain't all that).
OK, now that all the cynical stuff is out of the way, the day to day speed perception reality for me, personally, is as follows:
THE MACHINES
iMac G3 400 (file server only). Runs great. Course nobody uses it, it just serves files. But it's every bit as fast as our old Win2K PIII file server was, plus way more stable and all the rest.
G4 466 SP. Not fast enough for comfortable day to day work in OS X.2.6. My poor business partner grinds it out, but it's rough. Panther may help a little, but let's be realistic. New machine come January for him.
DP 1 Gig (Original). This machine is at the very bottom threshold of what I would call comfortable. Apps launch before I want to rip my head off, things render just as I'm finishing my drink. Overall general good experiences. Always room for improvement tho.
DP 867 (mirrored). Pretty much same performance as the DP 1 gig.
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THE SOFTWARE
Lightwave. I don't actually use this as much as I would like to brag I do, but certain renders take many times longer on a Mac than the PC. What else is new? The app, however, on a clean system launches in about a second. Don't ask me how they do it, but it's sweet. I wish all apps could do that. General modeling performance is excellent, but rapidly slopes off to poor when the polys get too high (which isn't all that high to be honest).
Photoshop. Solid. PS can always be faster as I tend to work on gigabyte size files, which bring the machine to its knees. I may actually jump off the deep end and buy a buttload of RAM for the G5 to avoid disk swapping. That would be something to be able to move a gig file around in RAM. [wanders off dreamy-eyed for a moment]
Final Cut Pro. Solid to very good. FCP 4 can do quite a bit without choking too much. Love it. I will pee myself on a G5 with FCP 4.
CuBase SX. Glass. Nuff said. (Could stand to render and mix down a touch faster. Bet it's crazy on a G5).
InDesign/Illustrator. Standard GUI sluggishness that plagues many OS X apps. I hear they are prioritizing that problem with future releases coming soon.
After Effects. Average. Nothing special in terms of speed. Can't wait to see what the big box can do with it. Now if Adobe will just program it properly to really take advantage. Not holding my breath.
Dreamweaver. Glass.
Safari. Almost glass. Call it Plexiglas.
Acrobat 6. Adobe should be destroyed for this piece of trash (performance wise). I mean SLOW. If you thought Acrobat 5 was slow, get your hands on this syrup. I'll be using Panther's 1.4-compliant Preview from there on out except for editing. I'd use Preview now, but I need 1.4's transparency support.
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WHAT IS SPEED?
Everyone has different needs and I can respect that. Hopefully they can respect my opinion, which is that the G4 has (had) a LOT of room for speed improvement. Duh.
Thankfully the G5 will solve most of that problem. However, even if I get a full 100% speed increase, it still won't be as fast as what I would need to be as productive as I can imagine (30 minutes to render instead of 60 minutes is great, but it's still 30 minutes). I can move way faster than my Mac (or any PC I've used), so my dream machine is still a good 10-15 years away. Nonetheless, I'll be loving the G5 as much as I can.
What helps a lot is multitasking. That is majorly effective, especially on the DP machines. It's amazing what you can do simultaneously that we could never dream of in OS 9. Rendering isn't nearly as painful when you can keep working in the foreground without hardly a hiccup.
What will really take it to the next level is multi-threading. Photoshop especially, but FCP too and others would be infinitely more productive if we could do an Image Resize on that 1 gig file, but keep working on that 20 MB file in the same app. Some apps do seem to multi-thread to some extent and the effect is huge. The other day I was importing a bunch of photos into Portfolio and found, surprisingly, that I was able to continue keywording the other photos that were already cataloged. Wow! Likewise, CuBase lets you do all kinds of stuff inside the program while you're recording! Whoah!
I admit, I'm on the critical end of things. I was also painfully close to switching to the dark side. Speed was just that important to me. Thank God for the G5. Seriously, thank God. That would have been one sad day for me to have switched.
OK, now that all the cynical stuff is out of the way, the day to day speed perception reality for me, personally, is as follows:
THE MACHINES
iMac G3 400 (file server only). Runs great. Course nobody uses it, it just serves files. But it's every bit as fast as our old Win2K PIII file server was, plus way more stable and all the rest.
G4 466 SP. Not fast enough for comfortable day to day work in OS X.2.6. My poor business partner grinds it out, but it's rough. Panther may help a little, but let's be realistic. New machine come January for him.
DP 1 Gig (Original). This machine is at the very bottom threshold of what I would call comfortable. Apps launch before I want to rip my head off, things render just as I'm finishing my drink. Overall general good experiences. Always room for improvement tho.
DP 867 (mirrored). Pretty much same performance as the DP 1 gig.
--------------
THE SOFTWARE
Lightwave. I don't actually use this as much as I would like to brag I do, but certain renders take many times longer on a Mac than the PC. What else is new? The app, however, on a clean system launches in about a second. Don't ask me how they do it, but it's sweet. I wish all apps could do that. General modeling performance is excellent, but rapidly slopes off to poor when the polys get too high (which isn't all that high to be honest).
Photoshop. Solid. PS can always be faster as I tend to work on gigabyte size files, which bring the machine to its knees. I may actually jump off the deep end and buy a buttload of RAM for the G5 to avoid disk swapping. That would be something to be able to move a gig file around in RAM. [wanders off dreamy-eyed for a moment]
Final Cut Pro. Solid to very good. FCP 4 can do quite a bit without choking too much. Love it. I will pee myself on a G5 with FCP 4.
CuBase SX. Glass. Nuff said. (Could stand to render and mix down a touch faster. Bet it's crazy on a G5).
InDesign/Illustrator. Standard GUI sluggishness that plagues many OS X apps. I hear they are prioritizing that problem with future releases coming soon.
After Effects. Average. Nothing special in terms of speed. Can't wait to see what the big box can do with it. Now if Adobe will just program it properly to really take advantage. Not holding my breath.
Dreamweaver. Glass.
Safari. Almost glass. Call it Plexiglas.
Acrobat 6. Adobe should be destroyed for this piece of trash (performance wise). I mean SLOW. If you thought Acrobat 5 was slow, get your hands on this syrup. I'll be using Panther's 1.4-compliant Preview from there on out except for editing. I'd use Preview now, but I need 1.4's transparency support.
-----------
WHAT IS SPEED?
Everyone has different needs and I can respect that. Hopefully they can respect my opinion, which is that the G4 has (had) a LOT of room for speed improvement. Duh.
Thankfully the G5 will solve most of that problem. However, even if I get a full 100% speed increase, it still won't be as fast as what I would need to be as productive as I can imagine (30 minutes to render instead of 60 minutes is great, but it's still 30 minutes). I can move way faster than my Mac (or any PC I've used), so my dream machine is still a good 10-15 years away. Nonetheless, I'll be loving the G5 as much as I can.
What helps a lot is multitasking. That is majorly effective, especially on the DP machines. It's amazing what you can do simultaneously that we could never dream of in OS 9. Rendering isn't nearly as painful when you can keep working in the foreground without hardly a hiccup.
What will really take it to the next level is multi-threading. Photoshop especially, but FCP too and others would be infinitely more productive if we could do an Image Resize on that 1 gig file, but keep working on that 20 MB file in the same app. Some apps do seem to multi-thread to some extent and the effect is huge. The other day I was importing a bunch of photos into Portfolio and found, surprisingly, that I was able to continue keywording the other photos that were already cataloged. Wow! Likewise, CuBase lets you do all kinds of stuff inside the program while you're recording! Whoah!
I admit, I'm on the critical end of things. I was also painfully close to switching to the dark side. Speed was just that important to me. Thank God for the G5. Seriously, thank God. That would have been one sad day for me to have switched.
Arden
Where mah "any" keys at?
But do you think you'd enjoy your work more on a PC than on a Mac? PC's don't have nearly the multitasking that Macs do, so right there you're dead in the water. You'd have to live with the counterproductive Windows interface. And you'd spend more time troubleshooting your PC than waiting for your Mac to finish a job.
BTW: The G5's have a 6 GBps data throughput for RAM. That should suit you well. RAM's cheap; always stock up as much as possible.
BTW: The G5's have a 6 GBps data throughput for RAM. That should suit you well. RAM's cheap; always stock up as much as possible.
I'll spring for a G5 in January. I'm hoping for a speed bump after the Expo, but that's not why I"m waiting. I have a two-year rule and January is the two year anniversary of the box I'll be replacing.
I'm also not worried about so-called Rev A problems. I've bought many Rev A machines for years and never had any more trouble than Rev B machines.
Part of it is that I'm going to be completely objective and see what the G5 reviews (official and unofficial) say. I'm also going to the Apple store and running some tests of my own. If it's what I expect it to be, then I'll pop for it.
As for dealing with Windows, obviously I'm fully aware of the Mac benefits, but since I make my living entirely from computer performance issues, I'd be stupid to ignore the (previously true) fact that the PC absolutely destroyed the very best Macs in performance across the board. And before anyone challenges me on it, don't waste your breath, I have all the self-confirmed data (we use PCs here too) to prove it. I can accept a small performance gap, maybe even as high as 20% for the pure bliss of OS X, better multi-tasking, better experience, things just "work", etc. But at some point, when I'm still waiting for things to render, launch, open, transfer, copy, paste, etc., I'm losing money. Period. That ain't gonna happen.
I fully expect the G5 to solve all those problems.
Hulk, you've got one on order, yes? Can't wait to hear your (objective) reviews. And none of that first day, holy crap it's faster than anything stuff. But one of those truly objective, month long analysis reviews. We all (me included) tend to suffer from the illusion that things are better/faster than they really at first, especially when we just dump a few thousand dollars on a new machine.
I'm also not worried about so-called Rev A problems. I've bought many Rev A machines for years and never had any more trouble than Rev B machines.
Part of it is that I'm going to be completely objective and see what the G5 reviews (official and unofficial) say. I'm also going to the Apple store and running some tests of my own. If it's what I expect it to be, then I'll pop for it.
As for dealing with Windows, obviously I'm fully aware of the Mac benefits, but since I make my living entirely from computer performance issues, I'd be stupid to ignore the (previously true) fact that the PC absolutely destroyed the very best Macs in performance across the board. And before anyone challenges me on it, don't waste your breath, I have all the self-confirmed data (we use PCs here too) to prove it. I can accept a small performance gap, maybe even as high as 20% for the pure bliss of OS X, better multi-tasking, better experience, things just "work", etc. But at some point, when I'm still waiting for things to render, launch, open, transfer, copy, paste, etc., I'm losing money. Period. That ain't gonna happen.
I fully expect the G5 to solve all those problems.
Hulk, you've got one on order, yes? Can't wait to hear your (objective) reviews. And none of that first day, holy crap it's faster than anything stuff. But one of those truly objective, month long analysis reviews.
We all (me included) tend to suffer from the illusion that things are better/faster than they really at first, especially when we just dump a few thousand dollars on a new machine.
hulkaros
The Incredible...
Methinks that with the G5 it will not be an illusion even from first day... Especially my Dual G5/2GHz: It IS a speed demon! I'm 100% sure!
But what I cannot wait for is the combination of Panther and G5! Even on my TiBook G4/1GHz and PowerMac G4/933 Panther WWDC Preview smokes the Jaguar in almost everything... I cannot even imagine the final version of Panther combined with the powerful Dual G5!
An illusion? Nah! Kicking bottoms more like it!
Bottoms up ladies and gentlemen! Bottoms up!
But what I cannot wait for is the combination of Panther and G5! Even on my TiBook G4/1GHz and PowerMac G4/933 Panther WWDC Preview smokes the Jaguar in almost everything... I cannot even imagine the final version of Panther combined with the powerful Dual G5!
An illusion? Nah! Kicking bottoms more like it!
Bottoms up ladies and gentlemen! Bottoms up!
tsizKEIK
its all about HOUSE music
ive got a power mac g4 933mghz (soon to be replaced by a powerbook and later on a G5 .. (i hope))
anyways,. when dealing with simple tasks its very fast.
it takes hours though to convert a VIDEO_TS to a SVCD ... but who cares ?
at the same time ill be browsin on the net, recording a DVD or rippin any music to aac, talkin to my cousin on ichat, using VPC, checking my mail, sending files to/from my sony ericsson P800.. etc...
my point is that the system barely slow down, and i can get 2-3 things done at the same time. and that is fast enough for me
anyways,. when dealing with simple tasks its very fast.
it takes hours though to convert a VIDEO_TS to a SVCD ... but who cares ?
at the same time ill be browsin on the net, recording a DVD or rippin any music to aac, talkin to my cousin on ichat, using VPC, checking my mail, sending files to/from my sony ericsson P800.. etc...
my point is that the system barely slow down, and i can get 2-3 things done at the same time. and that is fast enough for me
