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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.'"
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.
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...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
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.