G5 2.7 and Tiger Impressions

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mindbend

Registered
Just got a DP G5 2.7 a few days ago. Thought I'd post my initial impressions of it, especially in regard to Tiger. I kept a list of observations as I was installing apps and using the system in general.

Specs:
Dual G5 2.7
4.5 GB RAM
Default ATI Radeon 9600
Tiger 10.4

1. Booting is not super fast. 45 seconds at best from cold to launching Textedit. I don't really care either way, it's not like I need to boot very often.

2. Very quiet overall. Fans kick in from time to time in a slow crescendo. It's interesting to see when the computer really has to "think". I am now annoyed by computers across the room from me (older wind tunnel models) in stead of my own machine.

3. I like how the setup screen pulled my info from my .Mac account and had it all filled out for me. Nice touch.

4. Spotlight is very fast. It is a feature mostly worthy of the hype, however I would like an option for the good old fashioned in-line searching (maybe type colon first or something). Also, Spotlight needs to be smarter. For example, I typed "ea the donkey" in a file note field. When I spotlighted "eat the donkey" it couldn't find it because of my typo. However, in other cases Spotlight did find things for me far faster and easier than older methods, so it'll be a good thing overall. I like how Spotlight remembers your last search. I'm sure it's been discussed, but I don't recall seeing any mention of how Spotlight is essentially a more robust version of OS 9's indexed file searching, right?

5. Initial application launch times not much faster than older systems (Dual G4s I'm used to). Once they are cached, they relaunch very quickly. For example, Photoshop went from 7 seconds to 3 seconds (initial launch versus cached launch). InDesign went from 8 seconds to 2 seconds. Unfortauntely, this is mostly meaningless as it is highly unlikely that I would be able to take advantage of a cached launch. The good news is that with 4.5 GB RAM I can leave a lot of shizzle open. Most of the smaller apps launch in a second or two at most.

6. IMO, an unfortunate hodge podge is happening with Sherlock, Dashboard and the self contained Dictionary app. There are now at least three places to go for dictionary services. I presume the Dashboard widget simply accesses the Dictionary app, which is fine, but Sherlock really needs to die. Sherlock is just Dashboard with tabs. Let it go.

7. I see Help is as clunky as ever. A simple search on "Network" is still searching after a minute. Some other searches that I can't recall gave me flat out wrong information. In fact, now it isn't even working for me at all. Nothing works in Help. Maybe a reboot will help, but it isn't the first time I've had trouble using Help in Tiger on the new box. Update: Now I see it's working, just very slowly. Why does it take so damn long to show results in Help Viewer?

8. Chess is choppy when moving the board around in 3D. This is unacceptable in principle, even though I could really care less given the app. Note I have the lower end 9600 card, but still, it's just Chess.

9. After installing some apps I get a note about the OS wanting to fix security settings on a given file. Choosing the help (?) option gives me a blank Help Viewer. Of course, I fix the security thing (I assume it's a privileges thing or something?), but it's a shame they don't really explain what the point of it is or otherwise put people at ease (not that I'm worried about anything, but others wil be).

10. Resizing the window in Safari shifts the background texture in the bookmark bar area. Bug?

11. iWork already installed, just had to enter my existing serial number. Thanks Apple!

12. One of the Automator Tutorials was inaccurate. It was missing actions that the tutorial specified. I have since tried to find that turorial, and can't find it (in the Help Viewer). Go figure.

13. The 16x DVD drive is LOUD. Real LOUD.

14. Great case design, but that was a given. I still think the previous model finger-pull-latch system has yet to be beat in a case, but the G5 is nice too. The thing is a beast, but looks sharp.

15. Dashboard. I still think it's slightly overrated, given how much they hyped it, but it's kind of neat. Looking forward to various third party utilities. I might even have a programmer build me a widget or two if I think of anything worth the trouble.

16. iSync is kind of screw now IMO. I'm trying to go from memory, but I think I had to use Sys Prefs to set up general syncing info, but I had to use the iSync app to add a new device (ipod). Does that sound right? Whatever I did, it wasn't as obvious as it should be and seemed kind of clunky. All syncing and device setup should be handled in one app/interface.

17. Just realized that 22" cinnie (ADC) won't connect to the G5 (DVI). Argh!!! There goes another $100 on an adapter. I've got this stupid little 15" monitor on this beast for now. :)

18. Does Dashboard have to always be on (always in the dock)?

19. No bar code printing for envelopes from Address Book? Otherwise, glad they added envelope printing. I use that al the time. Would just be nice to save the post office some work.

20. There's no feedback when you use Help Viewer and it can't find anything for you. It just stays blank or leaves whatever is up. It should at least give some sort of "No Results" message.

21. I can't view the online Tiger seminar video even though I obviously have Tiger and QT 7! Claims I need to install them. You already installed them for me, Apple!

22. Adding 6,000 font to Suitcase took maybe thirty seconds. I accidentally screwed something up and had to delete and reimport them. It took like three seconds (pre-cached?). Wow. Welcome to lots of RAM.

23. Wacom tablet double-click is now finicky. It semi-randonly decides it doesn't want to double-click. I can command+tab back and forth to kind of kickstart working again. Argh!

24. Came across a weird temporary bug that I can't reproduce. For a bit in the Finder I tried to move an app from the main Apps directory into Utilities. It instead it just launched toast when I dragged the file onto the folder (and did not place the app into Utilities). I repeated it many times just to be sure. I quickly installed Snapz Pro to see if I could get a screen recording of it, but it had fixed itself by then. Weird.

25. Grapher not as smooth as you would think on complicated graphs. And no antialiasing.

26. Can no longer print to my Lexmark S 1650 directly, but I CAN print to it when set up as a shared printer. Huh? Whatever, as long as I can print.

27. Ran some performance tests in Motion. Holy crap!

28. FINALLY. After four years of continual complaining about window resizing not being as smooth as it should be…well, it's finally there. Damn well better be at this price.

29. Over all impression. I expected Tiger to be a more obvious upgrade. It's actually pretty subtle (but still substantial and important). Panther was a far more dramatic upgrade (e.g. Exposé, Inline searching totally changed my workflow). That doesn't mean it's not a quality upgrade, it just means it's not as obvious to me (yet perhaps).

I'll update over the weeks with any more useful observations and general performance reports. Hopefully this will be helpful.
 
Truly great review. Thank goodness, a not hot-headed or super zealous review of two products. But anyways, I was wondering. What are the Burn and Flash effects like in Keynote 2? And the droplet effect with Dashboard, is it worth it? If you wouldn't mind terribly...could you email me a screenshot or two of the Keynote transitions? If you can't, thanks anyways. But, graphically, I've heard people say that Tiger is a little choppy, despite top-quality graphics cards and Core Image and Video. What do you think? Is it worth getting a new graphics card? Thanks!
 
what.

i.

wouldn't.

give.

for 4.5gb of ram.

very level headed i must say. i have the radeon 9600 in my G5 dual 1.8 and it has both ADC and DVI. swap? i have the DVI cinema disp and i need a second dvi to connect my other monitor (a cheap 20" XGA lcd) :p
 
Go here for an mp4 of the Burn/Flash effects in Keynote:

http://www.mindbendtoo.biz/test/keynote.htm

To me the Burn effect is a little campy, like the old Amiga Video Toaster type of thing. The Flash effect is more useful and professional, but a little dramatic. Use sparingly!

The Droplet effect in dashboard is pure eye candy. Sure, it looks nice, but so what? It serves no real purpose whatsoever. Not that I mind that, I'm just saying don't go out and upgrade your video card for it. ;)

---

Ly Major Burns,

I'd almost consider the swap except I've already got the dang adapter arriving tomorrow, so I'll just stick it out. Thanks for the offer though.

4 GB RAM for $500-ish these days. Looks to be a good investment so far.

---

More impressions coming soon!
 
ha ha ha! you also live the other side of the atlantic, so it was never going to be viable... :p

ram has got cheap hasn't it? i may just invest... when i get some money of course i can only get 3gb more, so we'll see
 
Thanks! That's something I think a lot of people would be happy to see. However, I'm disappointed! From my point of view, I can't understand what about those two transitions takes so much GPU power! If I saw all of the transitions, I would put the page flip and droplet transition in the section that requires Core Image. Well, thank you very much. I think that there is no question now, I have no interest in buying a better graphics card for those two effects.
 
Window resizing is SOOOOO much better, especially on my iBook. I am in love with my iBook all over again because it feels so much faster now, I always was kind of bothered by the performance it got (lousy laptop hd and the weak 256kb L2 cache) but it is a lot better now.

You can simply drag the dashboard icon from the dock and it will go away, the only app that does this, it still runs though.
 
Nice review although it was intentionally more tiger related and I wished to read more about the powermac performance. I wonder what kind of storage configuration you have in your new Dual G5 2.7. Are you using any raid system?
 
Hmm... with regards to no 27, what does holy crap mean in this context? Fast or slow? Not trying to be thick but it can be taken either way....
 
18. Does Dashboard have to always be on (always in the dock)?
Click to expand...
Nope. Control-click it, and the contextual menu has an option to remove it from the Dock. To put it back, drag its icon from your Applications folder back into the Dock.

Apple really needs to put a nice little checkbox in the Dashboard preference pane. As it is, it's very bad interface design. Oh well.
 
I have to say it is a very brilliant review!! If I ever have the money and possibility to buy one of those dream machines, I certainly will take this into account. Thanks for sharing and writing it all down!
 
Quick replies (I'll be adding more in-depth info over the days/weeks):

Zammy:

No RAID here, just the stock 250. I thought about the RAID, but the way I work wouldn't really benefit as much (I typically use external FW drives for each client video project, or I use the network volume for layout and web work, so no local access either way). I will certainly miss the RAID the next time I have to open up those 1-2 GB Photoshop files. I'll run some performance tests and let you know.

Viro:

Holy crap!= Damn, that is fast. I've only played a little so far, but I was shocked at how much you can do in complete 100% realtime. And even when you stack in some outrageous effects, you still might pull off 10-15 FPS, which is still plenty good for getting a sense of it. My test was this: background DV file full screen. Foreground DV file composited with Overlay mode. Text fly-in on top. Cool engine burner-type particle effect on top of all. Oh, I forgot to mention I put an animated mask (feathered even) on the top DV layer. All of this was 100% realtime, 30FPS smooth as glass. Now here's where it started slowing down. I added a drop shadow to the text (drop shadows always kill realtime). I also added a blur to the video and another effect. So basically once you start getting into the effect filters, you start losing full realtime (at least with several layers). I just tried recreating it in After Effects (6.5). The best I could get was 15 FPS with no filters and t was downhill from there. However, I must say this. Once the elements were cached in, I was able to get realtime in AE, including when I moved various elements around in the timeline. I thought it would have to re-render and cache, but it didn't. I was not able to get anywhere near that performance before (Dual 1 GHZ G4, 1 GB RAM). While AE is excellent and performing better than ever, Motion was clearly designed to sell G5s. High end G5s. Expensive G5s. The app is ridiculous, and I'm not trying to be a zealot. Show me anything on any platform anywhere near the same price that performs as well and then we can talk. Until then, Motion rules the realtime pre-viz world.

Off to the dentist…
 
Great review. I'm glad I didn't purchase Tiger, my money was better spent on buying a new 250G drive. Of course, Tiger is going to have some initial problem, however, unlike working with XP where these "little nit-picks" never get fixed...well, unless you patiently wait for 25MB+ service packs to come out every third thursday, with a full moon and the farmers almanac states it's a good day for snipe hunting. :D
 
InDesign is like glass. Like Quark used to be back in the day, only now with all the transparency effects and antialiased type. With highest quality preview, it's quick, but a little choppy on the high res stuff, as one would expect.

Keynote test video (9 seconds long, 832x624) took 6 seconds to render as MPEG4 (320x240 30 fps).

Exporting a multipass h264 uses about 90% CPU. I can do other things, like InDesign layout and not even feel it. Haven't tried doing lots of really CPU intensive stuff simultaneously yet. (Update: just ran Motion with a fairly complicated composite and was getting a smooth 10fps with h264 rendering in background from QT Pro). So far it looks like you can use a lot of CPU on a background task and still be able to work in the foreground without much compromise. Even on older machines (duals at least), OS X was VERY good at this.

A ten minute DV video looks to be taking about an hour to export as highest quality multi-pass h264. Only went from 1.96 GB to 800 MB. Looks great.

Preview. I like that Preview now scales the image as you resize the window. I don't recall Panther doing that. However, using Command+ - to zoom should expand the window so the image doesn't get cropped. Also, performance on a 40MB file was slower than I would have thought on this machine. It was only two pages, one page with a high res graphic, the other just black and white text and a map. Zooming should have been instant IMO.

A battery warning showed up when installing Tiger on a laptop. Since the laptop wasn't plugged in, a convenient warning reminded us that the laptop may run out of juice before the install finishes. Nice touch.

I plugged in a third party PCI card with extra USB and Firewire connectors. The G5 did not like this and would not even boot or turn on. Removing it fixed the problem. Oh well. Used to work on the older machine. No big deal.

You can export AND play movies from QT Player at the same time! This machine has no trouble doing that without dropped frames. And you can set up multiple export threads simultaneously. Nice!

OK, I ran several h264 tests. Here's the lowdown:

You can set bit rates from QT Pro (and presumably Compressor). So I force-compressed a ten minute DV video to 21.6 MB. It's a 320x240 at 30 FPS and looks excellent. On the big screen (22" cinnie) I'd say it looks superb at the smaller size. When I blow it up two double, it still looks "good". It takes on a smooth quality more than an artifacty quality.*

I did a full size, full frame rate forced into 21.6 MB (from original 10 minute DV of 1.96 GB) and it looks pretty decent, but is way more artifacted than the 320x240. To me, the 320x240 blown to double size is way more appealing to look at than the 720x480 when both are shoved into 21.6 MB final size. In fact, the 320x240 blown to full screen looks totally fine. It looks like DV does now when "high quality" (default) is not enabled for playback.

So the nice thing about h264 is that if you're tight on space, you can get something quite decent or even good. If you've got more space (and CPU horsepower), you get damn near perfect quality.

Trash emptying still has the same annoying thing where if it comes across a locked file, you have to tell it to continue. There should at least be an option to Continue for All Instances. And there needs to be an easier way to unlock nested files rather than using BatchMod or similar tools.

Microsoft Office, Word especially is still just a slow giant. When using outlines, it's got the molasses effect when creating hierarchy.

Closing lots of apps at once and restarting is a LOT faster. Even the big apps, like the Adobe lineup all close quickly when I blast thru and close them all. Presumably the extra RAM helps since there is less disk swapping?

Address Book envelope printing is inadequate. I can find no way of printing the company name AND the individual name. So basically I can't use it for my needs. May be user error. Address book does now show a gray color behind the keywords used in the search field. Did the older version do that? Glad I can finally share my address book with others in the office via .Mac.

Dragging emails to the Finder should automagically make them into RTF files (no need to Save As…)

And what's with screen caps now being saved as PNGs? At least make it an option for PDFs.

Safari has this new little eye candy thing where it loads in a full image by sliding it in from the top (like background type images, not each image on the page). It looks kind of neat.

3D performance in Carrara 4.1 is not so hot. I mostly blame Eovia. OpenGL performance not too impressive. LightWave and Maya and especially Modo perform infinitely faster for OpenGL. However, Carrara's rendering engine is pretty quick. Not as top end quality as the big boys, but it's rendering pretty fast on this box. Some day I may do specific tests, but I don't feel like it now. I may on request if anyone wants. Also, animations in Carrara are nowhere near the speed they should be. Simple animations should be realtime, no questions asked. I guess that's what you get from a cobbled together mid-range do-it-all app. Hexagon, however, runs like glass so far, but I haven't done a high poly count model yet.

Apparently the dictionary widget and app requires you to be exact in your spelling? There's no "did you mean 'this word'?" which is a shame. Granted, you can expand the list based on your entered letters and search manually from there, but it's not the same as having a mildly intelligent guessing engine.

Spotlight needs work. If you're looking for Plugin, but it's really Plug-in, you get nothing. Also, Spotlight doesn't currently search hidden Package contents. I suppose that makes sense, and generally I wouldn't want to anyway, but it turns out Carrara's help files are in the hidden package (utterly stupid, but whatever). And sure enough, Carrara's built-in Help menu is broken, so it can't find the help file. I had to really dig around to find it.

So far, none of the issues with the FInder icons being replaced by other icons. Also, I used to have an issue where I would "move" a file to another directory over the network by holding the command key and frequently the Finder would crash or the file would get lost, so eventually I quit moving and just copied and then deleted the original. So far no such issues in Tiger.

Network connections are a LOT better and more consistent. Also, broken network connections recover quicker than before. I have a set of network connections in my dock for quick access to a remote directory. It used to be that it was hit or miss as to whether they would work, especially after installing as OS update (which hasn't happened yet under Tiger, so we'll see). But even without an OS update it was flaky. And on the iBook, it was really flaky trying to use my dock shortcuts via Airport. It's like I had to set up my dock shortcuts fresh all the time to get them to work. Now I just lift the lid, click on the shortcut and I'm on the network. Every time. Finally.

When moving files from a one volume to another remote volume, it shows up more instantly. Used to be that you could sit there many seconds before the file would show up. Sometimes you'd have to back your way out of the directory and go back in to get it to show up. Tiger seems much better at showing them immediately. Same for things like if you Label a file with a color. It shows up remotely quicker.

Small, but annoying change is that when you are in Column view and you set the far right column to be wider than the other columns, when you delete a file from the second from the right column (command+delete), the far right columns shrinks back to match the other column widths. This may sound trivial, but what I tend to do a lot of is use the column view's preview of a given media (movie, JPG, etc.) and decide whether or not I want to keep it. Since I like to expand the preview window to be much bigger than normal, I get real annoyed now that it shrinks back up when I delete a file.


Lots of little bugs, mostly applications that need to be updated. In QuickBooks, when you double-click click on an account transaction, it actually opens the transaction BELOW the one you selected! This really screwed me up at first. Fortunately, I caught it soon enough, but it's a serious problem.

Summary:
After three weeks or so of using the 2.7 with Tiger here's my take. Overall it's a plenty fast machine. Some things are only kinda fast, like Photoshop where I thought it would be ridiculously faster, but it's just kinda fast (depends on what you're doing, of course. I'm talking large-ish files). Word is somehow sluggish as ever. Adobe's apps take a while to launch, as always. And Apple's own built-in help is slow (what the heck is taking so long, what is it doing, accessing web help or something?).

And other, much more important, things are really fast. Spotlight is virtually instant, maybe a second or two for the complete list. Motion is amazing. Final Cut is a joy. Carrara renders are pretty quick. After Effects feels like a whole new app (coming form a DP G4 1 ghz with 1 GB RAM).

One thing that is abundantly clear to me now is that abundant RAM (4.5 GB in this box) may be the single biggest benefit you can give your computer. Sure, I've always known that lots of RAM is better, but it goes beyond just being able to have more apps open and less hard drive sloshing. Apps crashing is virtually nonexistent. And certain types of copying of data is virtually instant. And some Final Cut exports seem to benefit from the extra RAM. I did some exports yesterday of 1-2 minute edits that didn't even show progress bars. I was like, did that even export? Sure enough, it did.

For DP2.5 G5 owners, you're not missing out on much. Both machines are excellent and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference when using them.

In the end, I'd say if you have medium need for speed, like web design, Photoshop work under 50MB, basic Illustrator work, etc. a DP G4 (800 MHZ or more) or an SP G5 would keep you plenty happy (I've got an 800mhz g4 iBook and pretty much find it unusable after Tiger. I may do a clean install.). But if you do 3D, video editing, heavy Photoshop, or are just sick and tired (like I was) of the ever-so-annoying lag in the window resize GUI, the 2.7 and Tiger is a joy.
 
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