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

Finally

[elliotj]

I really like the Mac. Honestly.

But I'm glad to see some independent testing on this front. I think those contrived Photoshop bakeoffs are an embarrasment.

I personally don't think Apples are as fast as PCs. I think most people agree. That's really not the point. There are many good reasons to buy a Mac. But a Mac running OS X is slow and everyone knows it.

Re:Finally

[azosx]

I'd say Apples in OS 9 are a lot faster than PCs. There's just something about OS 9, everything is very snappy and crisp, apps just open with out that familiar winding of your HD you get in Windows. Unfortunately, this isn't a very good argument considering OS 9 is officially dead but soon so will be Windows 98 yet I'm sure people will continue to run that for years to come as well. As for OS X, yes, if you're going try and run it on your Tangerine iBook, sure, it'll be slow, but so would Windows XP on that Celeron 333 box you have lying around. I run OS X on a PowerBook G4 550 and it's pretty quick. I get a higher FPS rate in Quake III with the 16MB Mobility Radeon than I do in Windows 2000 AS with a GeForce2 MX 400 64MB, go figure? Is is as fast in every day use as Windows 2000 AS on my dual 1GHz P3 box? Hell no, but a lot faster than it would be on that P3 500 I have lying around. OS X just like 2000 or XP require high end hardware.

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?

[tps12]

Nice defense. You basically argued that it isn't fair to compare the two because Apple's hardware can't compete, and I would agree.

All this trial does is throw some long-deserved doubt on Steve Jobs' repeated claims that hardware specs are meaningless and that performance must be intuited emotionally rather than objectively measured.

This strikes me as a predictable outcome after years of focussing more on pretty cases and bouncing icons than on what's inside. Being 2 years behind the cutting edge in hardware just isn't going to pass muster.

Re:How is that exactly equal?

[jchristopher]

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.

Uh, I think that's the point! Look at what you get for your money, see how much faster the PC is? It would be nice if Apple would include faster RAM, bus, and drives. Unfortunately they have chosen not to sell computers with those features.

The only comparison that anyone can make has to use what they sell. The Mac system compared in the article uses what they sell - in fact, the FASTEST computer currently available from Apple. Note that the Athlon system they compared it to is not nearly the fastest available Wintel, yet it wins the test anyway, and costs less than the Mac.

Re:How is that exactly equal?

[crisco]

I would imagine that the equality is in the prices of the respective systems. Bang for the buck, I think my dad called it.

The Polywell starts at $3000, as does the dual G4.

The equality is also in the long standing claims of superior performance from some Apple tr^H^Henthusiasts.

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.

Shake for x86 is NOT being killed.

[Doktor Memory]

You can run Shake on x86 to your heart's content, as long as you run it on Linux. This being slashdot, you'd think the story editors would be clued up on this sort of thing...

Another benchmark

[dh003i]

These are some benchmarks the scientific community will be interested in:

(1) See how long it takes each machine to completely align a large gene (i.e., 500+ nucleotides) for a large number of isolates (i.e., 30+).

(2) See how long it takes each machine to complete a maximum likelihood hueristics search using a large gene and a large number of isolates, to determine the phylogeny of the isolates.

(3) Etc.

Re:Another benchmark

[ScumBiker]

Ok, I'll bite. Which side wins your proposed gene counting, Mac or PC? As a recent purchaser of a new dual-1ghz Mac, I thought I was getting a reasonably fast machine. I
m satisfied with what I've got and I'm enjoying the hell out of learning this beautiful new OS along with grinning from ear to ear as I cat foo | grep oof in the terminal.app.

Re:Another benchmark

[0x0d0a]

For a market like this -- parallelizable scientific computing will, at least for several years more, stick with x86. Why? It's cheap. No one cares about a slick desktop or neat UI features if you just want another headless box in the cluster chewing away at numbers.

Of course, none of these people are going to be using Windows, either...

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.

Where's the BIG picture ...

[ultraslide]

Sure enough, even the Mac lovers can agree that for the same cash a PC is gonna be faster than Mac. Intel and AMD have big incentives to keep those clock speeds as high as possible.
But ... where are the studies about the entire work flow? Just because the machine is faster at grinding thru certain processes, it doesnt mean that the same job will get done quicker. What's the time to import/export files? What about saving those big files off to another disk? What about the learning curve for new apps (or OSs for that matter?) What about downtime for repairs and upgrades? What about end user training? These all "cost" in the end. I'm not saying that Apple would win this kind of study but I know from personal experience I do "get more done" on my Mac than on my PC.

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.

Re:Everyone already knows this

[0x0d0a]

Windows does not suffer from this problem

It's all relative. I still happily use my PII/266 as my main box. I just use Linux, Sawfish, and a suite of fast apps (dillo and rxvt are the two primary ones).

Er, no.

[Doktor Memory]

But after mid-2003 it will be biting the dust as well along with the IRIX version.

Er, no. Nobody from Steve on down has said a damn thing about the fate of Linux/Irix Shake after 2003 other than that they'll evaluate it at the time.

Apple has been pretty consistant about being willing to publish non-MacOS versions of their top-end software (ie: WebObjects) when they know that there's a demand for it. I strongly suspect that if current Shake customers make their needs known, they will be tended to.