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Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "Rob Galbraith posted a comparison among two Macs and two PCs. Both a high-end Mac and PC are included with somewhat surprising results given the number of Mac zealots who will claim otherwise... optimized for PC, Mac support second, Photoshop is faster, yada, yada, yada."
Thought it said digital pornography comparison. I've never clicked on a Slashdot story so fast in my life!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Surprising? I think not. Every /. reader here knows that Apple has been dragging its ass in the sand in the processor race due to Motorola's lack of money/research/carbonated beverages, and this isn't going to change until IBM gets around to releasing the "G5" architecture, probably using multiple cores on chip. So this is all old hat until then, really.
And especially in terms of this article, would productivity improve if the Gimp was used on, say, a Linux box?
--sexy gal
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Sure they appear to be slow, but that's because they're so fast that time slows down as a result of general relativity. Yeah that's it. I can't believe that you mindless Pee Cee thugs didn't know that.
Morons.
--Steve Jobs
Mac zealot here, wanted to know where the PC zealots were. I also bumped into the VAX/VMS zealots as well, they were hanging with the System V zealots, who were, in turn also hanging out with the BSD zealots.
I don't care what computer you use, why should you care what I use? Ahhh, PC zealot. In case you must know, i have a PowerBook G4, an RDI Powerlite, and a Sun Ultra Workstation.
There are countless articles on this subject. We know the PC's are faster. In some cases signficantly faster.
But there are a variety of reasons for choosing a machine and platform, speed is not necessarily only the thing that comes into play.
For example, I, for one, just how long the battery on that super 1337 Alienware notebook lasts. It's probably not anywhere close to the Powerbook.
Oh well.
But doesn't anyone else see that this is pointless? Use what you like to use......
I gather that GIMP 2.0 will fix that particular problem at some stage, when 2.0 will be released is another question...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If your life as a digital photographer revolves around menial tasks such as catalogging zillions of photos, sure, get a PC. But if you actually take decent photos and make something of them, get a Mac. Where are all the output and retouching related benchmarks? I want tests of RGB-->CMYK conversion, unsharp masks, gaussians, color correction (white/black levels, contrast, brightness, etc,) and other tools photographers actually use to prepare their photos for publishing...
Have the slashdot editors just decided to post only repeats in some kind of sarcastic, like, thing?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
okay if you can still play MP3's and run photoshop , who cares about which system is better ? Futhermore I have seen many rich guys with top tech machines that cant design to save there lives, there creative output rivals that of yack puke , but a guy with natural talent could make much more asthetically pleasing work on a 486 running photoshop 2, so shouldt the real debate be on does technolguy make up for bad asthetics or color blindness ?
PC's do not have correct color output, and never will. No matter high end the PC, the colors never look "right" or balenced on the screen.
That's why if you ever go to a magazine's or newspaper's office, you will never see any layout or photowork being done on PC's, because the colors just aren't balenced. The only two systems I have seen get this right are Macs and Sgi's, and that is why they are still so widely used!
Even if people use PC's for processing work, professionals always go over their images on a mac, just to see if it looks "right".
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
You can buy diffrent laptops from diffrent companies. There are probably hundreds of laptops on the market now from Transmeta powered toshiba librito which can get up to 14 hours of battery life, to devices like yours which are insanley powerfull.
You can't get a 14 hour mac, and you can't get mac as powerfull as your alienware notebook.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A single company with a proprietary box vs. the PC world with huge third party support and development. That's like a technology race between a dictatorship and a capitalist state. The outcome is obvious. It's just a matter of time.
There will be plenty of time for smoking doobies when your living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER.
Macs are sooo warm, fuzzy, and cute! Who needs raw performance when your Mac can make SUCH a fashion statement. Take that Micheal Dell!
I don't generally buy the fastest machine on the block, but Apple seems to be really falling behind. Their answer seems to have been to ship all Power Mac G4 towers as dual processor. But two slower processors are not as useful as one fast processor. And the heat sinks and noise on those G4 towers are even more ridiculous than on the Pentium 4's.
My "terribly slow" Dual 1 Ghz Macintosh is limited by its slowest part... me.
I keep the CPU meter running in the dock, and its twin towers of darkeness mock me..."what's the matter, buddy, can't even feed two glacial G4's? We're just sitting here, at 20% of capacity, while you try to decide which Actionscript to incorrectly code next..."
Even when I'm saving giant Photoshop files, checking 14 e-mail accounts and loading web pages into three different browsers (IE, Chimera, Safari), it still has one or two little dark blocks at the top of each meter. Probably just to piss me off.
Disclaimer: If I was a 3D or video artist, a 10% increase in speed could free up an hour a day. Since I'm not, even a 100% increase in speed would just mean my computer would have half as much to do while it waited for my sorry ass.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Does it even compare to Photoshop where professionals are concerned?
Short answer? No.
And especially in terms of this article, would productivity improve if the Gimp was used on, say, a Linux box?
You're joking, right? Linux can barely even display fonts properly.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Cyan is the absence of red, Yellow is the absence of blue, and magenta is the absense of green. Why is it so hard to convert colors?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Windows has had ICC support for at least 7 years, when windows 95 came out.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I looked at this thread and thought "here we go" expecting a huge flame war... but it's not - seriously weird huh? Where are the death threats from Mac users? (NOT a troll, I have been threatened with death by Mac users - true.)
Not until you realise that this story isn't on apple.slashdot.org. Had it been so, all posts that were not mac positive would be modded as flamebait, troll or offtopic. This is a personal observation based on personal experience.
BTW I own an iBook which I recently bought. My attitute to Apple has changed recently I must admit, however I have not threatened to "kick someone's ass" or kill them for critisising my choice.
I think this would be more interesting if the benchmark included a usabilty benchmark between teh two systems.
Meaning, start to finish, how long it took to setup each computer to be a good digital photography workstation, including color matching, scanner setup, etc. Plus, an examination of workflow on each system. Plus an examination on how much the operating system acted as a hinderance to actually getting work done.
Then I'd trust a benchmark. Processor speed and computational speed only extend so far. Windows vs. Mac is not a speed issue, but a usability and interface design issue. Regardless of speed, Mac OS X is more usable than Windows. It puts less obstacles to getting work done than Windows does.
You can't examine "performance" without measuring the performer's productivity, as that has as much to do with how fast a given system is as the processor speed.
PC's do have correct color output, you just have to calibrate the card plus the monitor. Todays videocards all have software calibration tools for colors. Photoshop on the PC also lets you calibrate your monitor when you first start the program.
FYI: a lot of paperfocussed designers are already moved to PC's.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
But there are a variety of reasons for choosing a machine and platform, speed is not necessarily only the thing that comes into play.
How about low price? No, I guess not. How about the ability to run Quark XPress natively? Oh, is that not important?
How about a non-crippled DDR implementation? Is that not important, either?
Damn. Well, at least you have instant friends if you buy a mac.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Well, I would imagine that someone who's job actually involved taking pictures would take a lot of them and look for that 'perfect' one. Ever see 'behind the scenes' documentaries about fashion photographers? They have cameras like machine-guns. "*SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP* gorgeous baby! *SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP*".
Anyway, why do you say that you should get a mac if you want to make 'great art'? PCs are just faster all around, the only reason to get a mac is because you like the interface more. It won't make you more productive unless you're so inflexable as to be unable to uable to function in a slightly diffrent environment.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Okay, wait, so they compared a 3 GHz processor with a 1.25 GHz processor? Even though it's dual, it won't be used by everything that he does.. OS X itself uses the Duals, as does Photoshop, but his digicam software may not.
;)
Regardless, it really comes down to a personal choice. Are you strong enough to make the right one?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
well sure, 99.99% of the time the computer isn't doing anything, but even a few miliseconds shaved of something like opening a new window feels nice.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
As someone who studied photojournalism at RIT (I still prefer working with b/w prints in my basement darkroom), but ended up in the computer biz, I read your comparison article with interest.
I won't bother arguing the stats, because I concur that potential doesn't matter, real world performance in the tasks that you do on a daily basis is what is important to you.
I will say that usability is as important as raw benchmarks; I happen to find Macs more usable. Any time I spend struggling with a computer is time lost when it comes to getting my work done.
But the real point of my post is to ensure that folks here who are using Macs are aware that Apple has some very interesting machines due out before the end of the year that are surely going to garner attention in the speed department. Out goes the Motorola G4, in comes the PPC970 from IBM -- it is 100% compatible with any software your G4 runs, it just happens to benefit from the serious horsepower that IBM has developed for their high-end workstations and servers.
Yes, Macs are currently a bit slower than their PC counterparts at some tasks, but they remain more of a pleasure to use. Soon, you will have the best of both worlds in terms of ease of use, stylish design, and speed.
That honour would still fall to the person suggesting that the XP gui was something to aspire to.
The amount of support I have to give these people is minimal and is all application-related.
The other area I encounter non-technical people is the PC world and, of course, the level of support required is much higher. Each successive edition of Windows is more cluttered as standard, and the learning curve is often a major irritation for busy professionals. Things often don't just work out of the box. Only last week I spent a frustrating hour just trying to get two W2k notebooks to communicate properly over ethernet, whereas I don't even have to think about adding Appletalk boxes. OK so I'm stupid, but how many other people are out there who are just as stupid as I am, and also need to work with computers?
In short, I see no real change in the long term situation, which is:
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
They are doing something - dont hold your breath but I dont think they're not working on a 64 bit version for OSX.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
MAC vs. PC? No, Galbraith's article was about Single Processor machines versus Dual Processor machines. It's absolutely true that when you run single processor apps on dual processor machines, that they can run slower than on a single processor machine, and he wanted to demonstrate that. He happened to use two different platforms to do it, which unfortunately confused some people into thinking that the comparison had something to do with the different processor manufacturers, but he still did a great job of showing what apps made poor use of dual processor machines. Either that or I have no idea what his tests were trying to discover. Next week Rob is going to hurl a PC and a Mac with a trebuchet to see which one has better performance characteristics. Stay tuned.
You are right on all counts, but I will never give up my G4, and I own/use 5 different archs. I wish the Apple hardware was faster, I wish it was cheaper, but it still rocks.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
all sorts of good excuses tonight, caffiene, nicotine and late night will do this to people. watch out, you could be next. . . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I think this one goes to show more the fact that the current mac processors have such a lame memory bus than anything else. Most of the tests involve moving around GB to no end and there the PCs have a clear advantage (thanks to Motorola's ignorance of things like DDR memory and the like).
The crippled DDR support of modern PowerMacs (and the last Powerbooks) helps only when doing a variety of memory tasks simultaneously, as the processors are still fed at single speed.
Linux would rule if I had 30 years to life in prison on DMCA charges. I would finally have time to configure it, or write a winmodem driver.
AMD has the same problem Apple and motorola used to have. When comparisons were made between the G3/G4 and the pentiums of the time, apple/Motorola said that MHz isn't everything to CPU performance. Unfortunately motorola stopped worrying about MHz and apple has tried to avoid comparisons. Avoiding the issue however is not the correct solution. Waiting for Motorola to come out with something new is not working. Apple needs to start shopping for another vendor for it's processors. Porting OS X to another processor is possible, but who knows how long apple will wait with Motorola.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
In addition to the article it would have been interesting if someone put together a test and compared "back for the buck" ratios of different platforms.
I recently bought an iBook and a Dell laptop for about the same price. The iBook lags behind in almost all applications and also takes longer to boot. I guess in the end, it is the design that you pay for when buying a Mac.
December 2002 I was asked to do a migration for a printing-company, where it's new PowerMac G4 dual 1GHz needed to be migrated from OS 9 to OS X. But this was impossible, since the company had decided not to switch to Adobe Indesign but stick with Quark XPress. Using Quark 5 in a Classic environment, with all of it's font- and colormanagement, would be terribly difficult.
Since there is still no carbonized or cocoa-version of Quark, the majority of companies is waiting with their migration. And since there aren't a lot of companies (*cough!*Customers that pay for their software *cough!*) using OS X and software, spending much time and money on OS X and AltiVec optimization is not highly important for commercial developers.
If OS X had a larger marketshare, I think the software would be much better optimized and the differences would be much smaller. For instance, see what Apple did with the Safari-browser !
(I don't say that a Mac with OS X would be faster than a PC though, since that is pure speculative and can't be tested !)
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Apple does have Colorsync built in, which enables matching of scanner, monitor, and printer. Now, you *can* get software for the PC that does the same thing -- and it works well. However, the entire graphics and publishing industry is built around the Mac, Mac software, Mac color profiles, and Mac people who do things the Mac way. So unless your business is completely self contained, it doesn't make sense to use anything else. (If it is, fine, do what you want.)
Interesting point. I used to run a duel proccessor machine at my last job , my current job im back on a G# mac , but my single processor machine at home ran photoshop better because I had more ram and a better video card in it, so while the duel processor machine opened and saved documents faster the overall running of photoshop was better on more ram and a better video card, I never ran any tests but I could notice it, the other diffrence was the operating systems 2000 on the duel and 98 SE on the home pc with a detonator pack loaded made a diffrence I think
you should really hang around on OSNEWS. Every once and a while a comparison of different compilors does come around. Try this post as an example http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2376
It's a decent example of pentium 4 benchmarking using the Intel and Gcc compilers.
...beats the hell out of pointing and clicking around GUI apps for repetitive tasks like the file conversions used in this test. Try doing that on a PC...
When i bought my powerbook with osx it was too soon, things didnt really roll until the 10.0.4 release. I was sucked in by their excellent marketing of the powerbook g4 running a gorgeous open sourceOS. Call me a sucker but apples marketing department sure knows what its doing! Still I felt resentment over buying (into) something that didn't live up to what I thought I would get.
But right now things are different. OSX is sweet, my powerbook g4 at 400mhz might not sound like a powerhouse but it's sexy. No matter what I run on it or do with it it conveys an image that I am stylish, that I value quality over other considerations such as cost and speed. That I think different. Even though I am a programmer I really noticed that this laptop made me stand out. If you're meeting creative people commercially the powerbook does the selling for you, it tells them you are no lummox. In many many fields the thing the apple brand means and conveys about its owner is a priceless add on.
I have to say i mostly run mandrake 9.0 cooker on the powerbook G4. With KDE 3.1 beta. People who have never seen osx but heard about it sometimes think Im running OSX and they comment on how beautiful it is. Yeah KDE 3.1 is gorgeous! It runs very well on the 400mhz G4. But all that's besides the point. (albeit it does show that its hardware rather than software that appeals!)
Apple did something with its brand that very very few companies have done. They created incredible value; Apple appeals to people. You dont get that with your dell or toshiba or even an alienware rig.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Having changed over (finally) from Mac OS 9.2.2. to OS X 10.2.3 on January 1, 2003, my memory of how Photoshop worked on MacOS 9 is fresh, and it is slower on OS X.
With OS X I'm often, very often, waiting for the machine on Photoshop operations that I never have in the past.
OS X is in it's infancy, still in some ways a beta test product.
A fast PC will beat current Macs in many things, at least until the PC gets its knickers in a knot and needs to be rebooted.
Apple does indeed need faster processors, and a lot of the kinks still need to be worked out of OS X and applications that work with it.
Does the fact a PC can do some things faster than my Macs bother me? Yup! Does that mean I'll be changing to a PC anytime soon? Nope!
I'm comfortable with my Macs and with my *nix server.
Tomas
Well, and of course there are other things like loading programs and stuff that gets speed up a lot.
One intresting thing: I gut a duron 1.2ghz to replace my 600. That's twice as fast. When I installed it I was amazed at the speed. Then I burnt it out, when I moved back to the 600, I didn't notice anything at all.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From talking to the Photoshop folks, I get that Photoshop is basically equally optimized for both platforms, and they take fine-tuning their platform optimizations very seriously. It was one of the first apps taking advantage of the Altivec engine, and Adobe was releasing interim optimization plug-ins every time Intel made improvemments to their MMX technology.
They compared the very fastest notebook you can buy (when not running off battery), which only runs nearly that fast when tethered to wall outlet with cpu cooking at like 50W, to a PowerBook that is slower than any you can buy right now (20% lower clock rate and much less cache than currently available) and uses less than half the power.
What kind of comparison is that???
Looking at the charts, it appears that a current PowerBook would easily smoke the P4 book in speed alone. Even if you ignored the higher cache (which is not insignificant b/c altivec is severely handicapped by small caches), a 1GHz PowerBook would be about 25% faster than the one they tested. This would make it faster than any P4 book even when P4 plugged into wall cooking at like 50W.
Furthermore, PowerBooks with Radeon cards can run at full speed for hours on one battery, whereas P4 books will roast your nads for about an hour while running half speed and then die.
I've never owned an Apple product and certainly am not a mac zealot, but this test is ridiculously rigged. Nice way to get on Slashdot real easy.
Myself and a bunch of other N*X geeks at the local user group have bought iBooks in the last year and a half. There are reasons other than speed to buy mac over intel.
...every time the Mac vs. PC debate rolls around - I use (and support) both kinds of machine extensively in my job, and can conclusively say that by far the worst thing about either platform is the users.
You may get a bit of a wow factor when you carry around a flat laptop like that - or a laptop with a detachable screen and winxp tablet edition.
... carrying around a mac powerbook g4 laptop .. maybe its something you need to experience. I can tell you it's weird to have what is just a productivity tool impart such a message to the people that see you use it. I've been a PC person since I got an IBM PC running at 4.77 mhz, built my own rigs and bought average laptops from nondescript brands.. Nothing to prepare me for the experience of having my laptop computer be a hot fashion article. Its very interesting.
But
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Who still cares about speed with 1GHz+ processors ? 400MHz is fast enough for me, only people dealing with synthetic images need the fastest... I mean what difference does it if your filter applies in 6 seconds instead of 3 ?
blah
I owned a Libretto L2 and the battery life is about 2 hrs max. Using any power saving mode will make quite un-usable.
No seriously,
My PC's too fast, I can't get as many things done in a day as my PC can manage, you know I need to think a little between tasks and a fast pc just leaves me....ummmm.... not waiting and bored.
Please give me a slower computer so that I can be less bored and more productive...
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
now come over to some outdated apple hardware, that is more than 6 months old and already updated by apple.
Now we'll run a bunch of tests which aren't really graphic design, but more just heavy processor benchmarking. Mix this with totally ignoring real world creation speeds in sight for things like continual rapid disc access.
Then look at what you are really getting, it's no suprise than a single 3.06GHz chip is out performing 2x1.25GHz(and despite multithreading, 2x1.25 isn't 2.5GHz, and will perform much slower than that). Now I look at the differences in times. Despite picking tasks which are more cpu dependant, the apple still performs comparably despite being a lower clocked cpu, and running on an OS that will not allow photoshop to use 100% cpu when other background tasks are in use.
Your graphic designer will argue that the mac is faster in real world design creation. Or alternatively if you are willing to take serious contrived tests, try the apple photoshop test script, which will leave a 1GHz powerbook outperforming the fastest pentium 4M (2.25GHz) by up to 40% in some tests.
I needn't bring in other real world graphic design issues such as windows inability to colour sync or high speed access to firewire and other important graphic design orientated technologies. Or perhaps the fact that the powerbook in question is already a 2 year old design, and even back then it still had a digital screen.
So I apologise to the boffins that think throwing me a bunch of contrived numbers will disprove my real world experiences.
New Powerbooks like the one I have on order have a 64Mb Radeon 9000 in them. The reason I have one on order is because my old 500MHz Powerbook is showing its age a bit (I dropped it and now the DVD-ROM and one screen hinge is broken). Other than that, it would still be a fine machine. It's easily fast enough for my purposes (office type work, development type work), so I'm looking forward to the new one.
:)
Even though it's two years old, people still comment on what a fab laptop it is. Looks count I guess
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I'll admit, OS/X is nice, and I've considered buying a Mac for it, but I just can't justify it at all.
I'm no Windows fanboy, but your claims that it crashes all the time are simply fucking wrong.
If it crashes that much, either:
a) stop running that shitty old copy of Windows 98 you bought/copied 5 years ago on your modern (or hey, even an old) PC, and install a real OS like 2k or FreeBSD.
b) get your hardware looked at. Its either cheap, or its fucked. I'd argue that most cheap hardware is fucked by design, but your milage my vary...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This is a horrid way of justifying PC vs Mac... Macs don't benefit from speed, that's obvious... the 'mhz myth' campaign by apple is just a marketing ploy.
The real reason to use macs in digital editing is colour. The colour (yes, with a 'u') on macs is infinently closer to print than a PC is.
This is why apples are used in 99.9% of print shops, and PCs are used in more web design shops. If you aren't printing, then PCs are just fine. Soon as print comes into the question, you simply can't use PCs. You'll be printing, editing, printing editing, so often that it'll take a lot longer than waiting 2 extra seconds while exporting a file.
Anyone who works in printing will know what I mean if they ever tried putting a curve on a dcs file... PCS just can't get it right.
I manipulate very very large photoshop files (100 meg +). A dual g4 1gzh is plenty fast for this..
I usually am playing mp3s when working and its still fing.
And that OSX is realy stable. Plus the built in color matching in OSX is a blessing..Saves so much time when printing, I usually get what I expect out of the printer, which saves time ink and $.
For about 2.5 years I used a Nikon Coolpix 990 for all of our digital photography needs. Pretty much every picture required some time in Photoshop because of the poor placement of the flash in relation to the main lens, because of the Nikon's tendency to run red, and because of the useless red-eye reduction feature. I just replaced it with a Canon EOS D60, and of the 250 pictures I've taken since getting it, less than a dozen have required time in Photoshop. I'd toyed with a Canon Powershot G3, and it seemed like it'd require very little Photoshop time, too. So if you've got a good enough camera and know how to use it, your CPU's clock speed won't matter much at all. You'll be spending more time worrying about hard drive space and how to back up/archive everything.
I have prints I made thru my job *cough* that are 15' long on that baby. A panorama the size of a room with the view of what you really saw.
I also have some very incredible 20x30@400dpi printed on Colour Metallic paper.
God I loved that machine....
What's not elaborated on here is why many graphics pros choose the mac. It isn't for raw speed, but because they prefer the development environment the mac gives them over Windows. Even if something is faster on the latest cutting edge PC, if it is harder for the user to get what he needs done then it makes no difference. As a user of both OS X and Windows I can attest to this. The fastest PCs have been faster than their mac counterparts for a while now for some things. But I don't really care about that. OS X improves my workflow so much that it probably evens out in the end. To make a car analogy, do I have to buy a Ferrari just because its faster? I think I'll stick with my Rolls Royce.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Ignoring issues of comparing Apples to oranges... I expect the multi-processor PowerMac was chosen because there aren't any single-proc that go much over 1GHz, while the P4 is at 3GHz. I also understand the author was using current machines and so did not go with an older 1GHz P# (which would probably have included other older components). Can anyone with knowledge on Apple's multiprocessor tech and the software in question comment on whether said software would have effectively used both processors, if at all?
Paintshop pro.
Photoshop.
But while I'm using linux only. my own imagemagick scripts on fam do job way better.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
How about low price?
For the record, the Alienware laptop shown was about $500 more than I paid for my new Powerbook there, killer.
--- What
I wouldn't wanna have one in my basement.
My Macs are Macs running OS X & OS 9.2. My PC is a server box running slackware. It might as well be invisible.
I don't like the x86 architecture. I definitely don't like Windows. I like Aqua. End of story.
The hardware'll get faster next week and the week after and the week after that. But I bought it when I needed it and when I could afford it and when it did what I needed. And with the style I wanted to do my work in.
That's what its about.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The R&D of late on this chip have been aimed at highly specialized, mostly embedded, uses like set-top boxes for satellite and cable TV, networking equipment (Cisco and Nortel are big customers), and automotive systems.
Dont forget, IBM is the one that is running the PowerPC show now, not just Motorola.
Rob Galbraith is dumb and wrong to draw conclusions about platform superiority from benchmarks of the Canon File Viewer Utility. The slashdot comments here are equally irrelevant because none of you seem to be photographers that use this software (I see 0 comments discussing RAW image conversion out of 237).
;-)
Canon's RAW image convertor is a proprietary piece of software that turns the RAW data off the camera's CCD (or CMOS sensor in the case of the high end Canon SLRs) into TIFF or JPEG files.
Canon's RAW image conversion software is HORRIBLE on BOTH Mac and PC (measured by performance and UI). It has to be one of the most poorly written pieces of software I've ever used. Benchmarking a platform with this software is inane! It's like comparing two cars by screwing on concrete wheels.
Canon's software is obviously written by amateur programmers (or maybe even AN amateur programmer). It was poorly coded for the PC and, in turn, that bad code was then ported to the mac. Where Canon digital cameras are ingenious...the best of breed, their desktop software is clueless, worst of breed.
Further, the Canon File Viewer 1.1 code on the mac is not naitive, it's carbonized (and only just barely carbonized...it was released just a few months ago and has recieved no updates from its initial 1.1.1.22 version). The classic mode Canon RAW Image Convertor actually works better (from a UI and performance standpoint) on the Macintosh than the carbonized Canon File Viewer 1.1. (Im testing with a Powerbook G4 800).
Canon's horrible software has driven third parties to attempt to build better RAW image convertors. Alas, Canon has not released the algorithm for RAW image conversion to the public (nor licensed it commercially). This has left developers guessing how to decypher the RAW file format. No third party including Bibble (which Rob Galbraith uses as another benchmark...bonehead) has achieved any performance improvements over Canon's bad software because of its closed source nature.
The bottom line is that your OS selection should not be based on Rob Galbraiths data but on more refined aspects of each OS, like how productive you will be on each platform over a period of years.
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PS. You slashdotters enjoy your flame war about mac vs PC. An OS is what you make of it. I'm sure all of you have settled on a favourite platform already... so why are you arguing which is better? And if you haven't decided on a platform...I'll save you some time, buy an Apple G4 running OS X.
The tester, in an attempt to compare apples to apples (so to speak), only used software with versions on both platforms. Having ported a good deal of software to the Mac, I know that companies tend to treat their Mac versions as second class citizens. Often the Mac versions have an internal emulation layer of one kind or another.
In any case, what the tester was trying to do figure out which system was fastest. What he should have done was look for the fastest graphics software on each platform. On the Mac, I'm pretty sure that won't be software from the camera manufacturer. What needs to be tested is the speed of the task, regardless of which software performs it.
Quoting:
"Troy Dreier, writing for PC Magazine's First Looks section in the February 4 issue, calls the dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 "one fast machine."
In a benchmark in Adobe Photoshop, the magazine finds that cross-platform comparisons with a new 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Hyper-Threading, the G4 outpaces the PC in every test but one, the Gaussian Blur, in which the match was a draw.
He reports the G4 is faster at Sharpen Edges, Unsharp Mask, Despeckle, Convert to RGB, and Resize (presumably thanks to the Velocity Engine, and Photoshop's dual processing support and G4 optimization)."
Check it out at http://www.powerpage.org/story.lasso?newsID=10439
did you even read the article?
One of the last tests ran was to run TWO applications at the same time (PS in fg and RAW converter in bg and vice-versa IIRC) and even in THAT case (that should have been much better for the SMP box) the intel-based computer was faster.
Also PS *does* take advantage of SMP, especially on macs: the point of the article was to buy the absolute fastest Mac available and pitch it against an intel P4, if they wanted to they could have used a dual AMD and probably crushed the Mac machine in the ground even more (like the article suggests at the end)
-- the cake is a lie
I do that on a PC all the time. If you want to do it too, download ActiveState perl and ppm install Image::Magick. You can put Cygwin on there if you want (it's obviously useful to have grep, etc.).
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
The real difference in times for this test was on the batch processing tests. I, like most people, don't do tons of batch processing. So what? Over the course of a year, how much time do I spend waiting for my Mac to finish a Photoshop batch, and how much time do I spend installing anti-virus software and dealing with OS problems on my WinTel box. I'm still using my Mac to get more done.
yes, we print in a cmyk world for the most part. that has not stopped adobe with pdf from proposing and implementing rgb workflows in prepress. although it takes years for new workflows to be implemented--why indesign is not making a dent in quark's ineptness--they are beginning to hit the high end. we work in web printing--mostly books. and this is where the new tech happens, due to the cost savings realized. cmyk is nothing great, it's just another method. as a designer, i don't even really look at color on screen, it's in my head. i'm sure many photographers work the same way. film (nor ccds) do not see what you see. as a professor used to tell us, "look through the camera, not at it!"
I have one of the Dual 1.25 GHZ G4's and from my experiences with it, even in dual processor capable apps, it seems as if most of the heavy lifting falls on one processor most of the time. So I would guess that the scores the G4 got were mostly on one processor with the other picking up the occasional few threads of execution and handling other system tasks.
.vobs down to hard disk minus CSS and macrovision) and have them both going at full speed at once.
One of the advantages though is that while one CPU is maxed out dealing with photoshop (with a bit of help from its brother from time to time), you can use the remaining horsepower in the other CPU to do other things without really impacting your photoshop job very much.
Also for tasks where it almost always uses only one CPU, you can sometimes get two going at once and have both finish at the same time. I do that a lot when ripping DVD's to divx. I can get two movies going at once (after stripping the
Apple is working on better CPU's from all the rumors and such going around and if they keep with the dual processor game, the Mac will be set to overtake PC's in short order. In a way, I still prefer the dual G4 to the 3.06 GHZ P4 because I can fire off my P-shop job or whatever and play a game on the remaining power on the second CPU or work in another application without really impacting the big job on the main CPU.
That is where the Dual G4 really shines.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
* Multi-step resample: The time it took to resample up a D100 photo, in seven 110% increments, for printing on a 13 x 19 inch inkjet printer at 300 ppi, was tested.
* Unsharp Mask: The time it took to apply Unsharp Mask (Amount: 300% Radius: 1.5 Threshold: 1) then Fade the filter (Mode: Luminosity, Opacity: 100%), was tested. The photo's resolution was 20 x 30 inches at 300 ppi.
* Batch process using web site Action: The time it took to batch process 25 D100 JPEGs, saving them out as quality level 70 JPEGs using Save for Web, was tested. The processing steps were derived from an Action used in preparing photos for this web site: assign a profile, rotate, filter noise with Quantum Mechanic Pro, apply Unsharp Mask, Fade Unsharp Mask, resize to 450 pixels wide in three steps, apply Unsharp Mask, Fade Unsharp Mask, convert to sRGB, Export using Save for Web.
I have no idea what "web action" is nor would I be able to figure out what you mean by "set up." I processed over 1 gig of picutres and movies for christmas but I have no way to compare what I did to the benchmarks I read. I used two Athlons, a 1.3GHz machine and a 650MHz machine with SCSI. Both had on the order of 500MB or RAM. There is no set up time because I use Debian and never have to turn the machines off. Most conversions were done through ImageMagick, with a little GIMP work here and there. HTML generation was done with a slightly modified igal and a simple shell script to feed it directory trees. All said, most of the work was automated and did not take much of my time. The most time consuming task was burning 20 CDs one at a time. I'd love to be able to compare some of the conversions head to head - like a simple image resample defined in pixels. Something tells me that my little machine would do very well against something encumbered by M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In short, take a power4, lop off core #2, reduce the amount of L2 cache, add an altivec execution unit, change the bus interface and make it on a smaller (.13 rather than .18) process, and eh voila, PowerPC 970
And will I need a soldering iron or do you think I'll manage with some tape, a conductive ink pen and a sharp knife...?
RMN
~~~
"I'm faster with Photoshop on my PC than anybody else is with Photoshop on Mac because I'm better at using Photoshop than they are. So nerr."
Well, judging from my flamebait and off-topic moderations I'd say that my point didn't make itself very well. Okay, I guess I have nobody to blame but myself about that.
The point I was making is that processor speed is not my biggest impedement to using Photoshop or any other digital editing package. You could sit me down in front of a P3 550 (as long as it has sufficient RAM) and I'll barely know the difference. The biggest improvements to productivity that I've had were not from computer upgrades, but rather from my knowledge of how the software works.
So yeah, my apologies to the moderators who didn't get my point, but I really wish you'd have asked me questions about what I meant before striking me down.
don't know if it's true, but it certainly is accurate regarding "pirating". i've long said that piracy was m$'s key to success. office was for so long "free". even if businesses paid for it. m$ was assured of a user base, that essentially got free training, thus making anything obsolete. (the bastards, they knwew it all along)
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Churchill quote from a parliment session.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
On a Mac, you can scan, capture prints, print to multiple printers, view your work on multiple displays, work on images in multiple applications, and still maintain perfect color calibration all along, because the computer itself has had color calibration built in for years and years. The hardware, OS, and application platform knows that the user wants to really see what is in his or her work. On the PC, this STILL is not so. What is the point of rendering your work a little faster if it is compromized by artifacts such as every color being wrong?
> If RAW photo and Photoshop batch processing are
> important in your workflow, then speed is what
> you need
Batch processing is the LEAST important Photoshop benchmark BY FAR. Here's why: as a Photoshop user, you sit in front of your work; examine it; decide to make a change to it, then you use a tool or command to make that change, then you WAIT while the computer does that change and displays the results for you. You have to wait because you don't necessarily know the next step you're going to take until you see the results of the last. That wait is the wait that we want to get rid of as Photoshop users. This is why the PowerPC has a bunch of special features for rotating and sizing graphics very quickly, because those are hugely CPU intensive and you do them all day long in any kind of creative workflow, still or video graphics especially. For batch processing, I turn it on and it runs in the background all day while I don't notice, or I run the batch on an older machine that is dedicated to that, or run the batch overnight. That is not what wastes ARTIST TIME, which is the most expensive part of a graphics workflow.
This article is crap. It is like a Tom's Hardware Guide To Digital Photography that talks all about seconds and MHz and nothing about color, style, art, workflow, creativity, and professional OUTPUT.
Kids: do not buy Microsoft game consoles and try to do real work on them. You will be frustrated unless you are using MS Office or just text-editing. That is all PC's are good for unless you are a part-time CS guy or have a geek around that you can abuse whenever Windows needs its dick sucked a little bit.
This kind of article makes Bill Gates get a chubby. "See? Our 9 pound notebook with a 70 watt CPU that constantly throttles back and 1.5 hour battery life and DOS2000 OS can pull data off a CF card slightly faster than a one-inch thick Mac with a 14 watt RISC CPU, UNIX, Mac, and 5 hour battery life. And the PC is $200 cheaper and comes with almost no decent software and almost no guarantees. What a value. Look, I put a picture on the screen! Wow!"
Come out of the 20th century, Slashdot geeks. Apple just launched a $3000 notebook that's 1" thick, has a 17" TFT screen, built-in Bluetooth, built-in 802.11g (note the g), built-in FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, DVI-VGA-S-Video out, 24-bit audio in and out, Mac OS X (now with X11 and KHTML-rendering Web browser), iLife (nothing on the PC is nearly as good as this, you have to see to understand), slot-load SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW), 5-hour battery (that's with the CPU running full-speed) and weighs 6 pounds. I don't know how anyone can seriously compare the Mac and PC platforms anymore. It's the 21st century: we don't carry big beige boxes or gasoline generators (to run Dell notebooks) in the field.
This article is like looking at the world of digital photography through a pinhole. Look at the bigger picture. There are a billion little reasons, like JPEG2000 only being supported on Mac OS X so far, like the way your photograph looks REAL on Mac OS X and an Apple display. The contrast and color balance just can't be done on a PC. There isn't one made that can do it and there never has been. They're not building for those customers over at Wintel, whereas Apple is. Bill Gates shows you a goo-gaw so you think the PC is the uber-PC, but then the features don't show up or don't work when they do. DirectX is no CoreAudio, for example. The same is true at every level of the two systems. You suffer so much in so many ways on a PC ? to say that it's OK because you can read your CF card a little faster is just so amazing. The built-in assumption is that you already have a PC and are willing to I.T. it. Why? Why? Why? What Apple ships just in software with a new machine is worth the system price. The hardware is basically free.
I know this is too late to get any reads, but if you look at the software used in the benchmark, I'll bet none of it is optimized to run on a mac, much less take advantage of Altavec. If you look at the one set of tests in photoshop, the mac desktop is very competative with the 3ghz pc. I am not arguing that Macs are faster computers, but I am saying this benchmark is useless
Yawn.
PCs may be faster ($ for $), but on the downside, PCs really suck. I hate them. I work on the bloody things for typically 8 to 12 hours a day, and all day long you're fighting with them.
Its the software. I use primarily Windows XP, and behind that Windows 2000 and Linux. And I am so sick of fighting with my computer to get simple things done (like try delete a big HTML file or an AVI file and have Windows Explorer tell me that "the file is in use by another application" when I know for a damn fact that the only application "using" the file is Windows Explorer itself. Or Visual Studio giving me a similar error dialog when I try to save .cpp files. Or excel telling me it can't open two files with the same name but in different directories. Or Norton Antivirus freezing up my whole PC for five or ten seconds every time I send an email. Or pressing WindowsKey+E after boot up and having to wait at least thirty seconds just for Windows Explorer to show itself. Etc etc etc, I'm sick of it).
There are hundreds of shitty little problems like these on PC software (Windows and Linux). I'm starting to realise more and more lately just how much I really don't like PCs .. I'm thinking, if I have to use a computer 8+ hours a day, I should at least be able to enjoy what I used to enjoy doing, i.e. C++ programming, some web page development etc. And I'm sick of dual-booting all the time, somehow two bad OSs don't add up to one good OS. So I'm thinking of getting a Mac. I'm hoping the software doesn't stink so bad as PC software does. Maybe I'm being optimistic.
Thats irrelevant, thats 10-bit per channel processing ON THE GPU, and provides absolutely no benefit to software like Adobe Photoshop, which must do > 8 bit (16-bit/channel in PS) colour manipulation *in the software*. It isn't really feasible to use the hardware for this. All that 10-bit/channel means is that your colours in a 3D rendered scene are going to look a little prettier (e.g. fewer banding effects etc) because there is greater accuracy in various *real-time rendering* calculations - the loss in these calculations then fall into the lower few bits, which then ANYWAY get trucated to 8-bits per channel for the final output buffer (and thus you're only getting 8-bit/channel resolution on your monitor anyway).
The fact is that the tools used by pro photographers may not be optimized for the Mac, making it way slower in real life application today. They don't care about the potential speed if manufacturers were to optimize their software, they care about speed now.
Anyway, the Mac came close or on top in only a couple of the many Photoshop tests, otherwise, it was in general soundly beaten.
The sad thing is that this is a fight on the Mac's home turf, and it's losing. 2.5 GHz worth of PowerPC was coming in far behind 3 GHz of PC.