Apple vs. PC in Adobe After Effects

An anonymous user wrote, "Digital Video Editing ran some tests to compare the Dual G4 with the Athlon MP in After Effects. They didn't use the fastest Athlons, but the results are pretty clear anyway. This is especially interesting after Apple announced that they would be killing Shake for x86 platforms. If Apple really wants to position the Mac as an alternative to x86 on the film / video effects market, they are going to need to improve their hardware, especially with AMD's 64-bit CPU just around the corner. From the article: 'Not one of the objective tests we conducted using After Effects bore out Apple's claim of Mac superiority. In fact, in most of the tests, the Mac was left lagging far behind.'"

Comments

How is that exactly equal?

[azosx]

How is dual 1.533GHz Athlon processors anywhere equal to dual 1Ghz G4 processors? The combined processing power of the Athlons is over 1Ghz greater than the combined processing power of the G4s. Again, I ask, how is this equal? Also, we know the amount of ram in each system but what type of ram was it. The G4 had PC133 but the Athlon? It was likely using 266MHz PC2100 DDR ram, far superior. What about the hard drives? Apples was probably a DMA 66 5400 or 7200 RPM drive while the PC was likely supplied with a DMA 100 7200 RPM drive. With the processors aside, there's a lot more to consider when comparing apples to oranges.

Re:How is that exactly equal?

[Alan Partridge]

that's not really fair, the Mac isn't REALLY 2 years behind in any realistic sense - the performance of that dual 1Ghz G4 would have been off the charts 2 years ago. Certainly, the Powermac is showing it's age (particularly that of it's mobo chipset) but I think that we're rapidly approaching a new mobo from Apple that will meet or beat the best PC configs. If you look back, you'll see that Apple's performance hikes tend to come in bigger steps, less often whereas the PC world gets a newer and faster chip every month or so. The Powermac definitely isn't out of contention yet, but the overhaul is due. FWIW, the article bears out my experiences quite closely as someone working in a cross platform environment.

Not surprised

[Aram Fingal]

Apple has always been careful to compare the G4 to the Pentium 4 and not Athlon. The tests I have seen comparing all three (even by MacAddict) tend to more than validate AMD's claim that the Athlon is faster Mhz for Mhz than the Pentium.

Apple has tended to fulfill Moore's Law in fits and starts rather than the smooth curve you see with the x86. They pulled well ahead about 3 years ago and then hardly moved until just recently. We'll see how far the current surge takes us.

Speaking of 64-bit processors, I suspect that the more portable UNIX core of Mac OS X will allow Apple to support a 64-bit machine at the consumer level before Windows can.

Re:Unequivalent Compression Codec Comparision

[Decimal Dave]

This AC is right; the Animation codec (one of the oldest codecs in the QuickTime package) uses compression. It's not even very fast compression - I've found that standard motion JPEG is faster. If they really wanted a fair comparison they should have used uncompressed video or possibly just standard DV spacial compression. Accessing uncompressed video isn't very taxing on the CPU (because it's not compressed), but it is very disk intensive because the files tend to be *huge*.

Re:Everyone already knows this

[drsmithy]

You are confusing speed with responsiveness. OS X lacks the latter as well, so the gist of your gripe is still applicable. However, the problem is *responsiveness*, not speed. An interface needs to respond immediately with some sort of feedback that the thing you have just done is getting some sort of reaction. That's why Windows 95 introduced the little hourglass+arrow pointer and MacOS Classic has the little zooming rectangles whenever you double click something.

It is quite possible for a machine/OS/interface to be slow, but still remain responsive. Unfortunately OS X fits squarely into the "unresponsive" category, even on quite fast machines like my PB667 (and a G4/933 isn't much better). X and its associated window managers/GUIs/whatevers tend to suffer the same problem. NT based versions of Windows (particuarly later ones like 2k and XP) remain quite responsive even on slower hardware and the king of all in terms of responsive GUIs, I'm led to believe, was the Amiga.