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• Merry Christmas. Now you need not worry about a child fingering your hole.

I have a B&W G3 PowerMac. This is one of the older PowerMacs, but it runs OS X perfectly fine.

The case sucks horribly, except for the fact that it opens easily. First of all, it's totally proprietary. Second, there's no expansion room at all. Want a DVD-RAM and a CD-RW? Sorry. Can't do it. That's pathetic. Third, it doesn't have any nice features like front-accessible USB/Firewire, big power supply (oh yeah, that's proprietary, too), slide-out motherboard tray, multiple fan mounts, etc.

It's an aestheically pleasing case with horrible design. I much prefer my PC cases, even though they aren't spiffy colors or have handles.

If you moderate me as flamebait, at least consider that some people on this Mac site agree with me and give instructions on how to move your Mac motherboard to a quality PC tower. The article is old and references an obsolete product, but the same thing has been done to newer PowerMac motherboards.

I have a B&W G3 PowerMac. This is one of the older PowerMacs, but it runs OS X perfectly fine.

The case sucks horribly, except for the fact that it opens easily. First of all, it's totally proprietary. Second, there's no expansion room at all. Want a DVD-RAM and a CD-RW? Sorry. Can't do it. That's pathetic. Third, it doesn't have any nice features like front-accessible USB/Firewire, big power supply (oh yeah, that's proprietary, too), slide-out motherboard tray, multiple fan mounts, etc.

It's an aestheically pleasing case with horrible design. I much prefer my PC cases, even though they aren't spiffy colors or have handles.

If you moderate me as flamebait, at least consider that some people on this Mac site agree with me and give instructions on how to move your Mac motherboard to a quality PC tower. The article is old and references an obsolete product, but the same thing has been done to newer PowerMac motherboards.

One item I'd like to add is that there are many Mac "hobbyists out there that like to tinker and experiment with their systems, and an array of web sites supporting them. I put myself in that category, as in addition to knowing I have reliable Mac system that'll last 3 years or more, I also like to keep them up-to-date without buying a new system. My G3s occurred by purchasing and installing (1 minute) G3 upgrades to surplus 8600 systems I bought for $150 long ago. The upgrade was $200 and I overclocked it to 333 MHz. and if had 1MB cache so the slower disk and bus speeds were hidden. Photoshop on my G3s and G4 runs better than on any of my PCs, and exploiting ALTIVEC for scientific floating point calculations, as per NASA Engineer, Craig Hunter can reach 681 MFLOPS

My 1.6GB G4 cost $700 (eBay helped). I plan to update my Linux/Windows laptop next week to a G4 Powerbook for many of the same reasons you cite. Thus, although I don't consider myself a "guru", I feel confident that anyone with a Mac and the plethora of web info can experiment and "tinker" to upgrade CPUs, CDRW, video, SDRAM, and even run OS/X on 8600s upgraded to G3s, just as I have done.

Thus, even in the 5%, there's a large community of MAC "tinkerers" who can probably hold their own (and find much in common) with their PC comrades who like to "mess with their system" and not just fix power supplies.

Ooops, Forgot the link to the dual 500 cube info:

xlr8yourmac

I started a thread on MacNN about the fact that any cocoa application can read a new Macintosh's unique serial number. I even wrote a sample program that accesses and displays it.

I thought that others might be as concerned as I was. Instead, someone confirmed that, yes-- the Mac's GUID is globally accessible, yes-- it's on the motherboard... but no need to worry because "As much as you feel that the serial number can be abused it won't. No vendor has shown any indication that they will use unique IDs in their programs and all we can do is hope that they won't."

Uh yeah right. Except for Windows 98, RealNetworks, Word for Mac, etc.

Why is that Intel's GUID problems were such a big deal and this barely gets a shrug?

W

Thanks again.

Apparently, these things are pretty tough to come by. I found this forum post, dated 4/19, about somebody who had 80 of the things... sold out within hours.

A search on eBay turned up one that recently sold for $300, and two open auctions with current bids at $275. Impressive, considering that Apple used to sell them for $249. The Anonymous Coward above said that my Cube will appreciate in value; evidently, that goes for the graphics card, too.

Of course, you didn't indicate whether you have one of the original iMacs or a slot-loading model, but it should be possible in either case.

Good luck!

-A.

Of course, you didn't indicate whether you have one of the original iMacs or a slot-loading model, but it should be possible in either case.

Good luck!

-A.

Actually, according to XLR8YOURMAC, Macs can mount the hidden partition using Norton Disk Doctor, which apparently gives direct access to 160 Mbps MP3 audio. No need to rip, just copy directly.

Actually, according to XLR8YOURMAC, Macs can mount the hidden partition using Norton Disk Doctor, which apparently gives direct access to 160 Mbps MP3 audio. No need to rip, just copy directly.

now that is reasurring... a Mac user packing heat

He would only be packing heat if he didn't use a CPU cooling fan for his PowerPC 601 or 603-based Mac. ;-)

1.CD Disc Recording Peripherals: Expanded support for QPS, EZQuest, LaCie, Yamaha, MCE Technologies and Sony devices
2.Image Capture and iPhoto: Improved support for several digital camera models from Canon, Kodak and Sony
3.DVD Playback on external VGA displays on PowerBook G4
4.PowerBook video mirroring will be on by default when connecting to a new display
5.Improvements for iTunes when the full screen visualizer is used
6.Login authentication support for LDAP and Active Directory services
7.OpenSSH version 3.0.2p1
8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication
9.Mail includes support for SSL encryption

Get it via Software Update. If you're a bit hesistant, might want to wait for what xlr8yourmac.com says. And MacsOnly does a variety of speed tests for every version released. I'm sure they'll put up new benchmarks shortly.

If it can be optimized for AltiVec, almost nothing will be faster than a G4.

Just take a look at these RC5 stats (mid-way down the page). G4s smoke everything, because the RC5 client is optimized for AltiVec, thus it can compute four keys in a single clock cycle. By comparison, Athlons do one key per clock cycle, and Pentium 4s do one key every four clock cycles.

So if you've got an operation that can benefit from the G4's SIMD capabilities, Macs are your best bet.

Haven't there always been significant differences between Adaptec Mac and PC SCSI cards?

The PC ones generally work fine in your Mac, you just can't boot off them. I've got a generic 2940UW that I use for running apps and scratch space, but I can't boot from it.

If you're comfortable hacking around with your hardware, check out: this page for info on replacing the EEPROM.

From that page...


The Adaptec 2940UW and 3940U SCSI adapters for Intel machines (PC's) can be modified to work as PowerDomain SCSI adapters for the Macintosh. The modification requires removing the EEPROM from the PC version of the card and replacing it with an EEPROM with a larger capacity. One then updates the card's Firmware by installing it in a PCI equipped MacOS machine and using the PowerDomain Control Panel to install the appropriate Firmware Update. [Note - there was a software hack floating around last year, involving a PC flasher and a hacked Mac Bios that had been trimmed (using Resedit) to remove the zero padding that was said to be in the Mac Bios file to allow it to fit in the PC flash size. Most people never saw this hack and it's probably illegal anyway (please don't ask for it)-Mike]

You can actually overclock quite a lot of Mac systems, way back to the 68k's.

F.e. you can OC the original iMacs (don't know about the new ones, but I had one running on 300Mhz, up from 233), the G4 Sawtooths and quite a bit of the older machines and clones.

However, this often requires soldering on or removing transistors on the motherboard, as is the case with todays G4s.

One notable exception to this are the PowerMacs based on the Yosemite motherboard (Blue & White G3 and the Yikes! PowerMac G4, which had a modified Yosemite). They have transistors on the motherboard and its remarkably easy to change the bus speed and clock speed.

For a good source on Mac overclocking, check out www.xlr8yourmac.com.

Some people already have drilled holes in the side...

Check out the BlueIce G4

And overclocking is just a matter of jumper settings for many machines. Surf over to XLR8YourMac for more information

> And the industry move from 16-bit samples to 24-bit samples for sound seem equally pointless... I don't think *anyone* can distinguish 65,535 levels of amplitude for sound, much less 16.7 million.

There *IS* a reason for higher samples: to prevent banding when doing "audio blending." In plain English: playing multiple samples at the same time to reduce (audio) artifacts.

I'm a graphics guy, so I'll give a few analogys.

Lets say you have a 16-bit framebuffer (65536 colors), and want to show partially transparent smoke. With each layer of smoke you add (blend) to the screen, you will notice artifacts (banding) due to the lack of gradients. If you remember the old Voodoo's 1 (which only supported 16-bit color (well technically 21-bit :)) you could easily see the artifacts.
i.e. (Not the greatest examples, but they should help you see the difference)
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/games/oldnews/990703.ht ml (Scroll down to the bottom), and
http://www.riva3d.com/v32.html

It's the same reason commodity graphics use 32-bits per pixel -- It's good enough. However, where detail matters, even 8-bits/channel is too low, 16-bit/channel is perfect for film -- that's 2^(16*4) = 64 bpp (bits per pixel) = 1.8e19.

The reason:
16-bit graphics only has 32 gradients (5 bits/channel) available (per R,G,B)
32-bit graphics has 4 channels, each with 256 gradients (per R,G,B,A)

The greater the number of gradients you have available to you, the less you degrade the signal, when you mix in other sources.

Now true, 16-bit audio, is only one channel. But if you want to mix channels together you could naively do something like:
channelOutput = (c1 + c2 + ... + cn) / n, which effectively drops the bottom few bits. (Should be Log2(n) but I haven't double checked the math.)

Now, you do have a point, most people won't notice any difference in 16-bit samples, and that there is decreasing returns on quality (i.e. 64-bit audio samples sound exactly the same as 32-bit audio samples.) But if you're creating/mixing audio, you want the highest quality you can afford.

Cheers

Ok, enough of the boring stuff. Here are some links to keep you guys semi-entertained. The Cube goes into the Museum of Modern Art. For those without a NYTimes subscription, MacObserver summarizes the article.

Now for the fun stuff. Case mods! Check out the Kleenex Cube and the Blue Smoke Cube. Also, here's an All American Cube.

here is an article from the same site that shows photos of what the connector looks like.

A couple of minutes with a hex editor and you'll be able to play DVDs in OS X.

The DayStar Genesis mac clone series was wild! (For those that aren't familar, see this: http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/ and this: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ULTIMATE_MAC/Elvis/inde x.html). Back in the day, it was one hellof machine. Up to four PowerPC 604e CPUs on the CPU card. 16 DIMM slots, 6 PCI slots. Not bad for 1997.

Because Mac OS Classic's multithreading was app-dependant, only "pro" apps such as Photoshop supported the additional CPUs. But when they did, whoa, did that thing ever haul.

But it was on the PowerMac version of BeOS that the DayStar really shined. The coolest thing was the CPU meter app in BeOS. You could click on and click off CPUs at will. Turn off two CPUs and watch the load on the other two increase. Click off all four, and poof, the OS halted! (they later fixed that "feature").

Anyway.... yeah, the old DayStar Genesis was awesome.

• I can only assume that there are errors on the web page. I did the mods by hand

Ah, I see your problem. Read this page carefully:

• "ugh, it looks as if I soldered it with my feet"

adding a bigger Harddrive to your iBook (dual USB): heres the URL [mac.com]

adding a bigger HD to your TiBook: Here [xlr8yourmac.com]

overclocking the iBook (dual USB) to 600 MHz and 100 MHz system bus: Here [xlr8yourmac.com]

note that especially the iBook upgrades arent exactly easy to do. LOTS of parts and screws.

adding a bigger Harddrive to your iBook (dual USB): heres the URL [mac.com]

adding a bigger HD to your TiBook: Here [xlr8yourmac.com]

overclocking the iBook (dual USB) to 600 MHz and 100 MHz system bus: Here [xlr8yourmac.com]

note that especially the iBook upgrades arent exactly easy to do. LOTS of parts and screws.

This site(xlr8yourmac.com) has a couple of articles on putting mac motherboards into PC cases (mainly for the extra drive bays). I used to have a G3 with SCSI and IDE on board, but could only put 2 HDs, zip and CD in it. One of the reasons I got rid of it is because I wanted an extra 3 or 4 drive bays.

This site(xlr8yourmac.com) has a couple of articles on putting mac motherboards into PC cases (mainly for the extra drive bays). I used to have a G3 with SCSI and IDE on board, but could only put 2 HDs, zip and CD in it. One of the reasons I got rid of it is because I wanted an extra 3 or 4 drive bays.

jeez, You guys want to call yourselves hackers, but if something is not x86, you bitch. If you hate the Wintel monopoly so much, why don't you just try a different architecture. Just have a couple of different computers around. This stuff is upgradable. Learn about carrier card, ZIF cards, carrier cards. Come on and git to it at: xlr8!

Check out this PPC rack mount hack. http://imac.pointinspace.com/. By taking a used/older iMac MB and fitting it into a 1U rackmount, you can end up in the sub $1000 range. And since the iMac MBs are pretty small you might be able to double them up. Maybe update the processor http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ if needed.

What to do with the monitor and case is up to you...

Here is a link I dug up

What I would do is get a good motherboard that has a NIC and SCSI on-board, that would save you two slots.

You may get a better response if you pose this question on
xlr8yourmac
macslash or
Linux on PPC FAQ-O-matic
other sites to look at may be:
www.linuxppc.com
www.linuxppc.org
I did a search on Google some time ago on the same topic and found some links on OpeneFirmware hacks to give a CLI style bootloader similar to the Lilo, BSD or NT bootloaders. I used keywords like openfirmware, linux, and bootloader, or something. I'll be in a similar situation soon, if I had more time right now I'd do the searching myself and report my results.

Pure FUD. The Public Beta already has SMP support in the kernel. See this forum where an ATI engineer confirms that Radeon 2d and 3d acceleration is in place.

ixMicro made a nice little 2D accelerated PCI vid card that you can get for almost nothing these days. That's what's driving the primary 20" monitor at my office.

I'm running a Voodoo3 for second (although primary) monitor at home, where I do both 2D design and play 3D games. Its 2D accelleration is quite good, almost too good. Scrolling menus zip right by.

Check Xlr8YourMac.com for comparisons of many video cards in many different systems.

--

ummm...how about try just about any Mac site you can think of:

Mac Slash (they even use Slash!)

Xlr8yourMac

Macintouch

...and don't forget the "big" news sites like:

News.com

and

MacWeek

With a bunch of single processor boxes (merely with more RAM and a faster CPU) you can just reuse the same motherboards which means you can buy them en masse and not be at a loss. With a small number of multiprocessor boxes you aren't moving the mobos out in volume which means you can't order large numbers of them.

All the new G4s use the same motherboards - the G4 chip (or chips) sit on a daughter card. You can swap the single out for a dual without any modifications. Here's a site that demonstrates this.

• He killed the clones. Granted they were killing Apple's business, but Apple wasn't producing machines as fast or as sleek as the clone companies. It took almost 2 years for Apple to catch up to Power Computing's PowerTowerG3/275 (or something like that), and it took Apple almost 6 months to release a motherboard that ran at 66MHz (Motorola was close to shipping one right before the no clone policy.)
• He doesn't ship any 6 PCI slot machines. Many of the people in Apple's Core markets need as many PCI slots as possible. SCSI (another sore subject), Video Caputre Cards, Video Cards (for multiple monitors), etc, are put to use well inside a Mac system.
• Their B&W G3 "Trojan Horse" firmware upgrade. They issued a required upgrade for their Blue & White G3 Macs that disabled the machine if you upgraded to a G4 processor before Apple wanted you to. They later fixed this situation, but most Mac users weren't happy.
• A few weeks after the B&W incident, Apple tried to ship G4 machines @ 400, 450 & 500 MHz. They couldn't get enough 500MHz chips, so they dropped the speeds down 50MHz, and then raised the prices of some people's orders (ie, if I ordered the 450MHz machine before Apple changed speed ratings, I would be shipped the 450MHz machine at the old 500MHz price...)
• Recently, Apple charged their customers $30 to debug their beta OS! Granted it is nice, but it is far from feature complete, and there are lots of thorny issues that Apple needs to straighten out (ie, do you display folders that begin with a "." -- it's a system file/directory in Unix, but it worked fine in OS 9...and a few CD-ROM's I own have folders begining with a ".")
• Mike at Xlr8YourMac had a petition to allow third party video cards to be installed at the Apple store. Almost 10,000 people signed it, but Apple seems to have ignored the wishes of thier customers. (FYI, ATI is the current supplier (both Radeon & Rage128 Pro), but 3dfx has Mac support, as does ProFormance, and supposedly the GeForce2MX is capable of supporting the Mac (no drivers, though) )

Heh, this is my second attempt at this post, because the first one didn't go through for some reason...maybe Taco is working on the site?

Anyway, to the point, the 256k Level 2 cache on the iBook is significantly better than the 1MB L2 cache on the Powerbooks for this reason: The L2 cache on the iBook is placed on the CPU and runs at the same clock speed as the CPU, while the Powerbook has an external L2 cache that runs at like 1/2 or 3/5 the clock speed of the CPU...There's a quick, unscientific result at Xlr8yourmac.com

Even though the iBook is faster than the Powerbook, I agree that the other features the Powerbook offers (PC Card Slots, Better Screen, etc) are much better than what the iBook offers a professional and thus would be idea for this consumer...

On of the big sellers over here on the Mac end of things are IDE->Firewire cases. The flexibilty of Firewire devices and the cheap price of IDE drives.
More info is often posted over at Accelerate Your Mac web page.

Of course this brings the ire of us folks who want native (ie bridgeless) Firewire drives, but hey, you can't expect everything at once, right.

Pope

Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

Even given their comments at E3? It certainly seems to me that 3dfx wants to pursue the Macintosh market.

There was a petition circulating at Accelerate Your Mac pleading with Apple to do what 3dfx was asking: make the Voodoo4 and 5 build-to-order options in the G4 towers. This is possibly more likely now that Apple is angry at ATI.

Theoretically, I suppose that this could be done with the Cube as well, but I wonder about heat concerns.

That plan has been in place for a while, and is the reason whyOS9 doesn't run on non-g3's and I believe OS 8.6 was the cuttoff on powerpc's.

You are way off. DP4 runs on PCI based 603 and 604 Macs TODAY (look here). OS9 runs on all PPC Macs.

OSX will run on all PCI based Macs, including the non-G3 and G4 ones. The only caveat is that Apple does not intend to support OSX on those boxes.

I believe http://xlr8yourmac.com/has reviews of various FireWire enclosures, including the ADS Tech http://xlr8yourmac.com/firewire /firewire_case_kits/.

--

I believe http://xlr8yourmac.com/has reviews of various FireWire enclosures, including the ADS Tech http://xlr8yourmac.com/firewire /firewire_case_kits/.

--

They're asking ~$4500 for the 4 G3's and ~$6500 for the 4 G4's. Each board comes with 128MB of RAM. This courtesy of http://www.xlr8yourmac.com

Isn't there suppose to be an issue with the PowerPC 750 that doesn't allow for multi proccessing. The PowerPC 7400 (G4) does.

I remember trying asking Daystar about multiple G3 and they said it couldn't be done due to something involving the L2 Cache.

It looks like these boards can induvidually send the processes out to the chips. Unlike the actual Dual G4 boards from PowerLogix.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.

One thing I forgot to mention in my original post is that there is a petition that asks Apple to include AGP Voodoo 4/5 cards as a build-to-order (BTO) option for G4's. If you're a Mac user, I strongly suggest you sign the petition. We all know that ATI's monopoly on Mac video doesn't encourage them to make good drivers.

I can't figure out why a Copper PowerPC has not been released yet.

I'm not sure if IBM has released any G4s to Apple yet (there was some hassle over getting any IBM G4s, but I think that was worked out a couple of months back, so Copper G4s should be forthcoming soon.

• Backside cache = L2, not L3 (Macs never had L3 cache; you can only get it if you plug a G3/G4 upgreade board in a pre-G3 Mac, in which case your old L2 cache becomes L3). In the G4 systems, it sits on its own dedicated 128bit bus (since AltiVec loads are 128bit), so it's plenty fast.
• The current bus bottleneck on the Macs is not memory->CPU (in part because of the large cache, in part because the G4 uses the new MaxBus protocol instead of the old MPC (or was it MPX?) one), but memory/cpu -> video. The reason is that Macs don't have something equivalent to Intel's store gathering. The AltiVec streaming hints slightly remedy this, but on the whole Intel's technique provides for better performance.
• The "certain [AltiVec] instructions may have been better optimized than others" comment is mere speculation on your part. Wrong specualtion actually: pretty much all AltiVec instructions take 1 cycle. Afaik only the permute-class instructions (which MMX/SSE doesn't have) take longer (and maybe some FPU related ones, like getting an estimate for the reciprocal).
• If your biggest complaint is that AltiVec mayt be overkill in terms of spilling transistors, then better start complaining about the PII/PIII/Athlon etc. Because they're based on the severely outdated IA32 architecture, they're full of hacks to overcome performance limitations (from translating the CISC instructions to RISC ones to insanely deep pipelines that obviously cause huge penalties in case of branch misses, which in turn requires huge branch prediction logic support). The G4 consists of 10.5 million transistors (including the 2 (!) AltiVec cores). That's less than half of the Athlon's 22 million transistors.
• If you think it's overkill in terms of functianality, than what exactly could be easily left away? Use only 64bit registers instead of 128bit ones? I don't think so: most matrices used in 3D maths are 4x4, so one row = 4 x single precision value = 4x32bits = 128bits. On the instruction front I think the only ones which may be a little superfuous are some bit packing/reordering ones, though I can imagine they can come in very handy when processing sound, (de)compressing video/sound data or when doing color conversions (not everyone plays games). Dit you actually look at the AltiVec instruction set?
• Yes, ATi's drivers have been improved. They improve constantly actually, almost every month another .001 release is done in one way or another The day you posted your reply, another one was done, which again improved performance. I think this pretty much shows that ATi isn't really quick optimizing their drivers for the Mac... If you want frame rates, check here

Altivec is designed for DSP usage but many apps demonstrate its potential as a desktop SIMD

Such as?

On this measure, the Mac's inferior memory bus loses to that of any modern x86 system--and thus the SIMD performs better, despite being slower under theoretical conditions which would never occur. A mismatch between system thoroughput and processor needs is bad engineering, not good. Of course, since Apple has very little input in the PPC design process, they can't do too much about it, can they?

If you want a result for a G4, see . That's PSBench 5.5 instead of 5.0 though, so you can't compare those numbers with the previous (it's also a G4 upgraded system, not one using Apple's Sawthooth motherboard). I don't know a site where they have PSBench 5.5 PC scores. On this same page you can also see the memory throughput has improved significantly with the G4 (and that's only a G4 processor in an older system, memory throughput on current Apple systems is higher than that since they have a better bus).

I believe PC's still win in terms of bus throughput (though not by an as large margin as they used to). Most of this is made up for by the large backside cache of the PPC's (1MB of cache running at half the processor speed on a dedicated bus).

In any case, it's well known that Photoshop is better optimized for the Mac than the PC, simply because most Photoshop users are on Macintosh. (Another good feature of the Mac--better color management. That makes 4.) Thus, Photoshop is written first for the Mac and then ported to the PC. Similarly, AppleWorks is written first for the Mac and (was) then ported to the PC: it too runs faster on a Mac. Also similarly, MS Word is written first for the PC and then ported to the Mac. It runs several times faster on a PC. Just as MS Word is an unfair benchmark, so too is Photoshop

Photoshop is just as much optimized on the PC as on the Mac. Want proof? One of the first applications that supported MMX and SSE when they first arrived, was.... Photoshop!

I don't think you can compare the porting of Word and/or AppleWorks with that of Photoshop, because the latter is a very CPU intensive program and the former are not. Scrolling speed of Word processors depends more on the typematic delay/rate and the speed of your video card/drivers than on your CPU speed. Also, MS Word on the Mac uses several "Windows compatibility libraries" so they can use the same API for the functionality. Maybe Photoshop does the reverse on Winodws, but the speed of Photoshop filters isn't determined by the speed of the UI or system calls.

[AltiVec]
Yes it does. It may end up being applied usefully to certain desktop applications, but a chip is always best at the niche it was designed for. In the case of the PPC, that niche is not the desktop, and it shows.

AltiVec is (almost?) a complete superset of MMX and SSE. Both of those were designed for desktop machines.

Altivec is designed for DSP usage but many apps demonstrate its potential as a desktop SIMD

Such as?

On this measure, the Mac's inferior memory bus loses to that of any modern x86 system--and thus the SIMD performs better, despite being slower under theoretical conditions which would never occur. A mismatch between system thoroughput and processor needs is bad engineering, not good. Of course, since Apple has very little input in the PPC design process, they can't do too much about it, can they?

If you want a result for a G4, see . That's PSBench 5.5 instead of 5.0 though, so you can't compare those numbers with the previous (it's also a G4 upgraded system, not one using Apple's Sawthooth motherboard). I don't know a site where they have PSBench 5.5 PC scores. On this same page you can also see the memory throughput has improved significantly with the G4 (and that's only a G4 processor in an older system, memory throughput on current Apple systems is higher than that since they have a better bus).

I believe PC's still win in terms of bus throughput (though not by an as large margin as they used to). Most of this is made up for by the large backside cache of the PPC's (1MB of cache running at half the processor speed on a dedicated bus).

In any case, it's well known that Photoshop is better optimized for the Mac than the PC, simply because most Photoshop users are on Macintosh. (Another good feature of the Mac--better color management. That makes 4.) Thus, Photoshop is written first for the Mac and then ported to the PC. Similarly, AppleWorks is written first for the Mac and (was) then ported to the PC: it too runs faster on a Mac. Also similarly, MS Word is written first for the PC and then ported to the Mac. It runs several times faster on a PC. Just as MS Word is an unfair benchmark, so too is Photoshop

Photoshop is just as much optimized on the PC as on the Mac. Want proof? One of the first applications that supported MMX and SSE when they first arrived, was.... Photoshop!

I don't think you can compare the porting of Word and/or AppleWorks with that of Photoshop, because the latter is a very CPU intensive program and the former are not. Scrolling speed of Word processors depends more on the typematic delay/rate and the speed of your video card/drivers than on your CPU speed. Also, MS Word on the Mac uses several "Windows compatibility libraries" so they can use the same API for the functionality. Maybe Photoshop does the reverse on Winodws, but the speed of Photoshop filters isn't determined by the speed of the UI or system calls.

[AltiVec]
Yes it does. It may end up being applied usefully to certain desktop applications, but a chip is always best at the niche it was designed for. In the case of the PPC, that niche is not the desktop, and it shows.

AltiVec is (almost?) a complete superset of MMX and SSE. Both of those were designed for desktop machines.

Mac video hardware has definitely fallen behind the PC, with the dual-processor Rage Maxx being unable to run properly in the current Macs due to motherboard issues. So what else is out there?

Right now, 3dfx has Mac drivers and a bios flash that will allow your standard PCI V3 for the PC to work with a Mac. The drivers are beta, but the card is cheap (since you don't have to pay the Mac hardware premium), and test show it blowing away ATI's cards (In 3D, 2D is so-so). Only problem is that the V3 wasn't designed with Mac support in mind, so there are a few hardware issues that may never go away.

The V5, on the other hand, was designed to support the Mac from the beginning. The Mac version has already been demoed (Rumor has it the Mac version was ready before the PC one). Here's an article from InsideMacGames. 3dfx is coming out with PCI only at first, AGP may come later.

nVidia has announced that they intend to bring out a Mac card sometime later this year, possibly the NV15 or a varient thereof. They've released little info on this--but they did hire some director or manager guy away from Apple a few months ago.