Friday Apple Quickies

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs' $78 million Apple income tops Fortune magazine's list of CEOs whose companies lagged behind the S&P 500 performance last year. The number 'reflects the value of five million restricted shares Jobs got this year in exchange for 27.5 million underwater options.'" markomarko writes "Well, despite Charlie White making all us Mac users eat crow over his comparison of render times between a dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac and a Dell 3.06 GHz P4, it seems that that Dave Nagel has given us a reason to take another look at the Mac. His article shows how After Effects render speeds can be doubled with the Mac, by using both CPUs."

Comments

Re:After effects

[cyb97]

I wonder if you know what After Effects does sir, as there are different uses for Final Cut *, Shake and After Effects.
After Effects is actually what the name implies a program to add Effects after it's been edited (or even while). Final Cut is a linear editor, while After Effects is a visual effects program. The do wastly different things.
Shake on the other hand is not unsimilar to AE, but the price tag on it ($5,000) just prices it out of the competition. That's also why they marked it as a digital composition tool, aimed at filmproducers rather than the average joe just wanting to put some flashy-text in his average home-video.

Frustrating

[Niles_Stonne]

Reading the "Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again" article was an exercise in frustration, particularly when the other link states how to nearly double rendering performance. The writing in the article just generally pissed me off.

Anyway, perhaps it's time to send a nicely worded e-mail to Mr. Charlie White. A real benchmark may be impressive, considering a 3.06Ghz Dell system was only 2 times faster than the 1.25Ghz G4 in the best case - a Mhz/Mhz comparison should put it closer to 2.4 times faster.

By doing a little analysis of their data, we get the following table:


Test Name (Mac Time in Seconds/Dell Time in Seconds) = Time Ratio
1. After Effects: Simple Animation (14/7) = 2.0
2. After Effects: Video Composite (85/54) = 1.57
3. After Effects: Data Project (227/125) = 1.82
4. After Effects: Gambler (43/29) = 1.48
5. After Effects: Source Shapes (426/254) = 1.68
6. After Effects: Virtual Set (495/264) = 1.88
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation (7.1/4.5) = 1.58
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects (62/35.1) = 1.77
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments (4.5/3.4) = 1.32

Average Time Ratio: 1.68


That means that On Average The Mac, running at 1.25Ghz only took 1.68 times longer to do the same task.

The "How to Double your After Effects Performance" article averages almost exactly a 2x speed increase, taking on average 49.2% of the time on the "long tests". Taking this into account, we can look at the two longest tests, factor in the speed increase, and look at the "final" performance:


5. After Effects: Source Shapes (209.65/254) = 0.83
6. After Effects: Virtual Set (243.61/264) = 0.92


If we go through the same calculation for _all_ of the calculations, we get the Mac BEATING the Dell, taking only 83% of the time that the Dell took. If we take the Photoshop calculations out of the average, it is still at only 86% of the time the Dell took.

Note that these are all calculated values, and as such may vary significantly from actual values, also that I used the improvement on the "long" test for everything, and did not use the improvement on the short test at all - I imagine that the two systems would end up nearly even in a real test.

Apparently all of my tables were lame when I had them formatted, thanks lameness filter!