More Quad PowerMac G5 Benchmarks

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

As the Quad PowerMac G5's (http://guides.macrumors.com/Power_Mac_G5_Dual_Core_%282005%29) start to arrive, more benchmarks are emerging.

Barefeats posts (http://www.barefeats.com/quad01.html) a collection of benchmarks from After Effects, Cinebench G5, Photoshop CS2, Xbench, and UT2004 comparing the Dual Dual-Core ("Quad") G5 2.5GHz PowerMac to the previous Dual 2.5GHz G5 PowerMac.

Meanwhile, Macsonly also (http://www.macsonly.com/index.html#_141) provides the same comparison with some similar benchmarks but also some "Real World" tests.

[ddub]

These benchmarks show us a lot more than those Xbench results from a couple days ago. The new Quad looks like it will live up to the hype!

[AoWolf]

This thing seems pretty fast. It will be interesting to see what the intel powermacs will bring and possibly later revs of there duel core machines.

[SPUY767]

Most of the graphics bench's are worthless b/c the 2.5 Dual has the 6800/256 upgrade. A card which, needless to say, trounces the 6600. At least the floating point ops are showing up at roughly 2x speed.

[ksz]

It's interesting that OpenGL on the Quad with an nVidia 6600 was about equal to the 2.5 Dual with an nVidia 6800 Ultra. In fact, it beat the Dual 2.5 on User Interface graphics and Quartz Extreme.

http://www.macsonly.com/index.html#_141

[EricNau]

Looks like it's pretty fast...I wish I had one.

[dberg]

not that it matters really b/c both systems had 3 sticks of 512, but when you dont pair the memory on the G5, doesnt this disable the memory interleaving capability of the G5 and severely slow down the machine ?

[iGary]

:eek:

I'd like to see some benchmarks against the 2.7, obviously.

[Mr. Anderson]

Looks like it's pretty fast...I wish I had one.

As I sit here waiting for my machine to finish rendering an image, I'm thinking the same thing.

I'm waiting for the 7800GT, though - so I probably won't have one until January....

Bleh,

D

[ACW]

At least these new results look real. Apple deny ever shipping any Quds in the UK so I think that guy in wales was a fake.

[ACW]

not that it matters really b/c both systems had 3 sticks of 512, but when you dont pair the memory on the G5, doesnt this disable the memory interleaving capability of the G5 and severely slow down the machine ?

The G5's come with 2 X 256MB chips so this machine was still paired.

[lopresmb]

yeah, its fast, but I wish the price were lower (or at least stick more RAM, HD, or something for the same).

Question, would a machine that had 3 cores be like (that is 1 dual core, and one single)? Is that even possible?

[bigandy]

i want one anyway :)

[Will Cheyney]

:eek:

I'd like to see some benchmarks against the 2.7, obviously.
Me too!

[yoda13]

Yeah, I'd like to have one too. Looks like the hype was fairly justified on this one.:p

[BRLawyer]

The Quad just trounces any PC out there...period.

[ipacmm]

Looks good, 3 more days until my Quad comes in.

[adamfilip]

looks like you already have enough macs.. why one more?

[lightsout]

The Quad just trounces any PC out there...period.

If you gave me the choice between a dual dual-core Opteron system, I'd take that over a dual dual-core G5 system. The Athlon64/Opteron are easily the best low-end (not POWER5/Itanium) processor available.

[gugy]

As I sit here waiting for my machine to finish rendering an image, I'm thinking the same thing.

I'm waiting for the 7800GT, though - so I probably won't have one until January....

Bleh,

D


Yeah, I am in the same situation. but mine is supposedly coming at Xmass.
I am glad I ordered the Quad. It seems very fast and will be a great computer to go thought the Intel transition.
I hope Apple will give us a copy of Ilife '06 because of the huge wait we are experiencing.

[plinden]

If you gave me the choice between a dual dual-core Opteron system, I'd take that over a dual dual-core G5 system. The Athlon64/Opteron are easily the best low-end (not POWER5/Itanium) processor available.
Athlon X2 (that's what I think you meant, rather than Athlon64) maybe, but are you sure about the Opteron? I can't find any dual dual-core Opteron system @ 2GHz or more for less than $7000.

[mac n cheese]

Am I the only one that is totally baffled and confused that the extreme high end Quad 2.5 ships with 512MB RAM? Just seems silly that it doesn't ship with at LEAST 2 512 sticks.

[Mr. Anderson]

I hope Apple will give us a copy of Ilife '06 because of the huge wait we are experiencing.

I wouldn't hold your breath....

I'm going to pick one up when they're actually shipping, I haven't ordered mine yet....

D

[iGary]

I wouldn't hold your breath....

I'm going to pick one up when they're actually shipping, I haven't ordered mine yet....

D

Sell off your son and get me one too, while you're at it. :p :D

[Dont Hurt Me]

Iam surprised that a single AMD 3500 running at 2.2 ghz can still whoop those G5 Powermacs in gaming, I realize that power is for Work but when it comes to the consumer/gamer its like having a Turbo V8 without a transmission. My UT2K4 scores kills those powermacs as does this athlon on every game i have looked at. What good is all that power if it cant be used? No wonder they are going to Intel. The Athlon's 64 are still the chip to beat as far as the Consumer go's. For the movie guy/photoguy these machines may offer a lot but for the Consumer they offer very little in my view.

[iGary]

For the movie guy/photoguy these machines may offer a lot but for the Consumer they offer very little in my view.

Maybe that's why they are in Apple's Pro line.

[BornAgainMac]

I use a Pentium M laptop at work (2.1Ghz) and I noticed my Powerbook (1.5) spanks it when comparing both laptops with unzipping and zipping files. My powerbook is much slower than my 2 year old Powermac G5. I would like to see how one of these new machines do first hand.

I hope next year's Intel is faster than this year's G5.

[BornAgainMac]

Iam surprised that a single AMD 3500 running at 2.2 ghz can still whoop those G5 Powermacs in gaming

DirectX for one. Wait till someone benchmarks a native Intel binary on a AMD 3500 of a popular game. I bet you don't see any improvement over the G5.

[gugy]

I wouldn't hold your breath....

I'm going to pick one up when they're actually shipping, I haven't ordered mine yet....

D

I don't want to burst your bubble but when I talked with the Apple representative she said that the custom Quads ordered in January will take the same 6 to 8 weeks shipping than the ones ordered now. I said that I would like to wait for MWSF and cancel my order and see what happens.
She said that the current orders will take most of the next weeks to be fulfilled and orders in January would still take 6 to 8 weeks to be deliver. So my guess after talking to her is that maybe by late February we might see short shipping times for custom quads.
Since I really need a machine soon, I decide to keep my order. I have 2 cinema displays sitting at my house in the boxes because i don't have a computer to hook them up. :mad:

[plinden]

Iam surprised that a single AMD 3500 running at 2.2 ghz can still whoop those G5 Powermacs in gaming, I realize that power is for Work but when it comes to the consumer/gamer its like having a Turbo V8 without a transmission. My UT2K4 scores kills those powermacs as does this athlon on every game i have looked at. What good is all that power if it cant be used? No wonder they are going to Intel. The Athlon's 64 are still the chip to beat as far as the Consumer go's. For the movie guy/photoguy these machines may offer a lot but for the Consumer they offer very little in my view.
Why are you surprised? A single-core AMD 64 @ 2.2 GHz PC will whup pretty much any Intel PC or Mac at gaming, but surely you 've been around Macrumors long enough know by now that the Mac issue with gaming is not a CPU issue, but is because of game optimization for the OS. The Intel transition isn't likely to help this much, if at all.

As for consumer vs pro, would you play games on a dual dual-core Xeon or Opteron workstation?

[aegisdesign]

DirectX for one. Wait till someone benchmarks a native Intel binary on a AMD 3500 of a popular game. I bet you don't see any improvement over the G5.

Too true. It's Apple's OpenGL implementation that sucks, not the processor.

[iGary]

As for consumer vs pro, would you play games on a dual dual-core Xeon or Opteron workstation?

I'm thinking of picking up a blade server to play Doom on.

[CaptainScarlet]

Iam surprised that a single AMD 3500 running at 2.2 ghz can still whoop those G5 Powermacs in gaming, I realize that power is for Work but when it comes to the consumer/gamer its like having a Turbo V8 without a transmission.

You also need to remember that most games that come out on the PC first then the Mac, are just ports. And we all know how that can be...

If you look at the titles that are released for both Mac and PC, I cant think of any game that was ported from the Mac to the PC, that's worth it...Or from Mac to console either....(no really I cant)

Mac gaming, as it's own identity, doesn't really exists in the commercial world.

Mac doesn't have one "Killer Game App" that draws people away from PC or console gaming.

IMO, this is were Apple falls flat and must take upon themselves to correct this. And not expect other companies to do it for them.

You say thier just a hardware company, but adding a Mac "Only" killer game app to their lineup would only increase sales.

[JCT]

I don't want to burst your bubble but when I talked with the Apple representative she said that the custom Quads ordered in January will take the same 6 to 8 weeks shipping than the ones ordered now. I said that I would like to wait for MWSF and cancel my order and see what happens.
She said that the current orders will take most of the next weeks to be fulfilled and orders in January would still take 6 to 8 weeks to be deliver. So my guess after talking to her is that maybe by late February we might see short shipping times for custom quads.
Since I really need a machine soon, I decide to keep my order. I have 2 cinema displays sitting at my house in the boxes because i don't have a computer to hook them up. :mad:

This is more or less what my EDU rep told me, he said that it will take them a little while to get things ramped up to build these machines in quantity. He didn't say things would take quite as long as your rep did, though.

Hey, I have a new 20" cinema display sitting behind me with nowhere to go. I just found out my new office will be done sooner than I had thought--and I am dead set on making it "PC-free" ----so it looks like I will have to migrate to the lab's extra Mini first :( . I guess the silver lining is that the migration from the Mini to a Quad with a 7800GT may be fun.

JT

[macorama]

Looks like a compulsory purchase for anyone who's in the situation of time = money. i.e. anyone who uses a computer for work and wastes time waiting for it to do stuff. Good luck convincing your boss of that though!

[bigwig]

Too true. It's Apple's OpenGL implementation that sucks, not the processor.
I bet SGI has a few OpenGL programmers looking for new jobs :(

[ATD]

I ordered a Quad today, they said it would be 10 to 14 days. :D :D :D

[gugy]

It depends if you ordered with the 7800gt card. these are taking much longer. The quads without BTO are coming much faster.

[lightsout]

Athlon X2 (that's what I think you meant, rather than Athlon64) maybe, but are you sure about the Opteron? I can't find any dual dual-core Opteron system @ 2GHz or more for less than $7000.

Well, I was more referring to Athlon64 to separate it from the Opteron.

They exist:

http://www.boxxtech.com/products/cf_step2.asp?ModelInstanceID=567

Although they are thin on the ground, and do get quite pricy. Certainly Sun do a new workstation too with is dual processor, they aren't shipping dual cores yet for some reason.

And to comment about PCs better gaming performance, saying it is DirectX doesn't explain why Doom 3 runs much better on Linux/x86 than MacOSX/PPC.

So it is likely:

1. Works better on x86 for whatever reasons (athlon64s are damned good, better compiler, some assembler code maybe, better use of x86's vector units than ppc, etc your choice).
2. MacOSX itself isn't good with games. Anandtech's performance review did indicate as a server OS, it does have some performance issues compared to Linux. Don't think this is too likely.
3. Your OpenGL implementation. This is generally your graphics drivers, this is why Nvidia beats ATi in Doom 3 so badly as their OpenGL implementation is so much better. Although ATi's new drivers go some way to fixing that actually.
4. The Mac version of the Nvidia/ATi drivers aren't as good as their x86 versions. Quite possible to me.

Don't get me wrong, MacOSX is a great OS and the G5 is a very capable processor but I suspect any performance problems are probably quite difficult to exactly pin down.

[aquafina]

Can't I get a Quad now and plug in the 7800GTX from a Retail PC Box? Yeah, it is more money, but I can have it now...

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

A test without Photoshop?

Move along plz, nothing to see here. (Well, almost... ;))

[kwajo.com]

A test without Photoshop?

Move along plz, nothing to see here. (Well, almost... ;))

but there is photoshop testing in the results ..


love the After Effects test, though it makes me and my Dual feel tiny in comparison :o

[rjwill246]

Athlon X2 (that's what I think you meant, rather than Athlon64) maybe, but are you sure about the Opteron? I can't find any dual dual-core Opteron system @ 2GHz or more for less than $7000.

And you don't have OS X- not exactly an inconsequential parameter.

[Mord]

Iam surprised that a single AMD 3500 running at 2.2 ghz can still whoop those G5 Powermacs in gaming, I realize that power is for Work but when it comes to the consumer/gamer its like having a Turbo V8 without a transmission. My UT2K4 scores kills those powermacs as does this athlon on every game i have looked at. What good is all that power if it cant be used? No wonder they are going to Intel. The Athlon's 64 are still the chip to beat as far as the Consumer go's. For the movie guy/photoguy these machines may offer a lot but for the Consumer they offer very little in my view.


dont hurt me do you just make the same post and duplicate it for every single benchmark thread, seriously.

the G5 is a perfectly capable chip, the gaming divide is purely to do with the porting, about 1/3 of the work is re compiling for ppc, but the rest is directx/API work the intel switch will do little for gameing, and i bet you you will come a whining about "how badly apples OS works for games" the mac will not be a gaming platform until games are written for it and ported elsewhere, their are more mac users than pc gamers, you are a minority, heck i'm in that minority, i just dont go bitching a whining every god damn benchmark thread that you have to go through the hardship of owning a pc and mac, wah wah wah the whole world should feel sorry for you.

the athlon is not not faster period, nor is the P4, nor is the G5, they all win at roughly 1/3 of the benchmarks, the fact that you cling a biased and irrelevant benchmark such as gaming does not change the virtues of a cpu, heck apple is going to make your perfect system in a few months time, a mac that can run windows for games and the mac os for work.

what good is all that power if you just use it to waste your life playing games.

[kwajo.com]

dont hurt me do you just make the same post and duplicate it for every single benchmark thread, seriously.

the G5 is a perfectly capable chip, the gaming divide is purely to do with the porting, about 1/3 of the work is re compiling for ppc, but the rest is directx/API work the intel switch will do little for gameing, and i bet you you will come a whining about "how badly apples OS works for games" the mac will not be a gaming platform until games are written for it and ported elsewhere, their are more mac users than pc gamers, you are a minority, heck i'm in that minority, i just dont go bitching a whining every god damn benchmark thread that you have to go through the hardship of owning a pc and mac, wah wah wah the whole world should feel sorry for you.

the athlon is not not faster period, nor is the P4, nor is the G5, they all win at roughly 1/3 of the benchmarks, the fact that you cling a biased and irrelevant benchmark such as gaming does not change the virtues of a cpu, heck apple is going to make your perfect system in a few months time, a mac that can run windows for games and the mac os for work.

what good is all that power if you just use it to waste your life playing games.

thanks for saving me the trouble, I wanted to say almost the same thing, and like you said if it runs work apps faster, then isn't that what's important for a pro machine? i'd rather go outside than play a video game anyway ;)

[Mord]

unfortunately i'm like dont hurt me in a few more ways than one, i have my athlon pc, stupidly over powered 2.8GHz x800XT, and i used to play games on it ever now and again, yet i haven't for a long while partly due to my studies and partly due to the fact xbox live is infinitely better, the pc still has use for a few things, like rendering, gaming was never it's primary use, balance is the key and for the few mouse and keyboard games that just dont work on an xbox my macs suffice, that said i'm going to go bake some macaroons.

[andiwm2003]

Iam surprised that a single AMD 3500 running at 2.2 ghz can still whoop those G5 Powermacs in gaming, I realize that power is for Work but when it comes to the consumer/gamer its like having a Turbo V8 without a transmission. My UT2K4 scores kills those powermacs as does this athlon on every game i have looked at. .....................


maybe that has more to do with the gpu and how the games are optimized. if games were optimized for dual core g5's and Open GL they probably would smoke a AMD if those games were poorly ported to wintel.

[Abstract]

If you gave me the choice between a dual dual-core Opteron system, I'd take that over a dual dual-core G5 system. The Athlon64/Opteron are easily the best low-end (not POWER5/Itanium) processor available.

But making a dual proc, dual core Opteron system would cost 2x more than a Quad core Mac. In fact, a dual core Opteron system would cost as much as a Quad core Mac.

yeah, its fast, but I wish the price were lower (or at least stick more RAM, HD, or something for the same).


Yeah, I wish it were cheaper as well. On top of that, I wish everything was cheaper as well.

If someone asked me if this machine was relatively expensive to comparable Intel or AMD based machines out there, the answer is no. In fact, this machine is cheap in comparison.

[dberg]

If someone asked me if this machine was relatively expensive to comparable Intel or AMD based machines out there, the answer is no. In fact, this machine is cheap in comparison.


This comment should really be a sticky b/c it cant get driven home hard enough. The DELL (or whatever current x86 company) equivalent of this machine in a dual dual core configuration is _WAY_ more expensive than the current quad G5 price.

[EricNau]

Am I the only one that is totally baffled and confused that the extreme high end Quad 2.5 ships with 512MB RAM? Just seems silly that it doesn't ship with at LEAST 2 512 sticks.
I think Apple did this because People like to buy their own, cheaper RAM. This was the customer doesn't feel like they are paying extra for Apple RAM (well, it's not really made by Apple).

[MacTruck]

I think Apple did this because People like to buy their own, cheaper RAM. This was the customer doesn't feel like they are paying extra for Apple RAM (well, it's not really made by Apple).


Most of apples sales are government, business and schools and almost everytime they just buy the ram from apple. That is why its so expensive and that is why they give you very little ram. Its not to benefit the consumer.

[iPoster]

As for consumer vs pro, would you play games on a dual dual-core Xeon or Opteron workstation?

If I could afford one! ;)

[GyroFX]

sorry, i don't know much about graphics cards, but can we put in any (PC) based PCI-e card into the G5? or will it not work due to incompatible drivers/software or lack there of...

[Kaiser Phoenix]

Yeah I am also in the market for a PowerMac and I was wondering whether you can insert a Geforce 7800GTX card into it, or is that not possible. Apple seems very weak in this area of graphic cards IMHO.

[Mord]

no you cant, the cards need different firmware to run with the bios/openfirmware and you can only flash it if the card exists in the mac world, you can probably flash a pc 7800GT, or even a GTX but it would only run with the GT's pipelines at the GT's speed.

[faustofernos]

We're just dying to get one for our gay podcast, so we can encode video faster, ya know...

I do the Feast of Fools podcast and I'm always snoozing on my poor little G4 867 laptop waiting for that thing to churn away...

[Evangelion]

Barefeats is in error in their UT2004-benchmark. they say:

(We included this in the CPU section because,
a) UT2004 is CPU bound, especially at 1024x768 and
b) it reminds us that most games are not aware of multiple processors.
We theorize the gain is due to the 4X cache size advantage of the Quad-Core.)

Quad-core does not have 4x the cache of the single-core. Single-core G5 has 512KB of L2-cache, while dual-core G5 has 1MB of cache for each core. So the core has twice as much L2-cache as the single-core variant has.

[Evangelion]

maybe that has more to do with the gpu and how the games are optimized. if games were optimized for dual core g5's and Open GL they probably would smoke a AMD if those games were poorly ported to wintel.

If you compare OpenGL-games on x86 to OpenGL-games on PPC, the x86 wins. It's not due to "they are poorly optimized for OpenGL" since they both use OpenGL.

you can play Direct3D-games on Linux with OK framerates (Direct3D-calls are converted to OpenGL on the fly), so it's really surprising that OS X is so slow on gaming when playing straight OpenGL-games. Apple propably has poor OpenGL-implementation.

[Evangelion]

But making a dual proc, dual core Opteron system would cost 2x more than a Quad core Mac. In fact, a dual core Opteron system would cost as much as a Quad core Mac.

I believe the price is less than that. yes, the Quad is a VERY good value for money, but I don't think the difference is something like 2x. Systems from BOXX for example do cost more, but they offer some extra stuff over the Quad (like better expandability).

[charleswhalley]

Ordered my beauty minutes after the web site was up and functioning in the UK - Estimated ship date was today. At 5.30 gmt I received the dreaded 'delay on despatch' message from the Apple store. OK only until November 22nd - but after living last years farce with the 2.5 Dual we ordered and waited for 3+ months I am gutted!

Hopefully next week will see the Quad arrive on our doorstep.

[fpnc]

Barefeats is in error in their UT2004-benchmark. they say:We theorize the gain is due to the 4X cache size advantage of the Quad-Core.)
Quad-core does not have 4x the cache of the single-core. Single-core G5 has 512KB of L2-cache, while dual-core G5 has 1MB of cache for each core. So the core has twice as much L2-cache as the single-core variant has.

In a sense, Barefeats is correct. In the 970MP each core has 1MB of cache and the quad-core Power Mac thus has 2 x 2 x 1MB or 4MB of total L2 cache. The single core 970FX has 512MB of cache per processsor and the previous Power Macs only contained two cores (two processors). Thus, the old dual Power Macs had 2 x 512MB of L2 cache (1MB total) while the new quad Power Macs have 4MB total.

[sai_digitalle]

Sup guys, my Quad G5 is due here on the 21st of this month and i'm going to buy some Ram for it. I've priced Crucial.com and it's $607.00 for 2 sets of 2 GB (2 sticks of 1GB) & Macsales.com is is about $470.00.

Macsales ram is made by Samsung. Do they make a RAM chip? Finally, Please give me your recommendations on places to buy RAM at a great price and great reputation.

Thx,
Sai

[Maxx Power]

If you compare OpenGL-games on x86 to OpenGL-games on PPC, the x86 wins. It's not due to "they are poorly optimized for OpenGL" since they both use OpenGL.

you can play Direct3D-games on Linux with OK framerates (Direct3D-calls are converted to OpenGL on the fly), so it's really surprising that OS X is so slow on gaming when playing straight OpenGL-games. Apple propably has poor OpenGL-implementation.

From what I have read in the past, OS X has a poor OpenGL implementation, I didn't really dig into it at the time, but if this turns out to be the case, I'll readup more on it.

[Evangelion]

In a sense, Barefeats is correct.

No they are not. They are basically looking at the specs of the single processor and comparing them, when they should be comparing the specs of the core (which matter in this particular benchmark). the processor in Quad has two cores, with each core having 1MB of cache. If they want to do a real apples to apple comparison, they should compare the core on the Quad, to the core on the dual.

In the 970MP each core has 1MB of cache and the quad-core Power Mac thus has 2 x 2 x 1MB or 4MB of total L2 cache. The single core 970FX has 512MB of cache per processsor and the previous Power Macs only contained two cores (two processors). Thus, the old dual Power Macs had 2 x 512MB of L2 cache (1MB total) while the new quad Power Macs have 4MB total.

Since UT is single-threaded, it does not matter how much L2-cache the other core has. UT is faster on the Quad because the app has twice as much cache at it's disposal (1MB as opposed to 512KB), and propably because of PCI-E and faster RAM. Yes, the entire processor might have four times the cache, but since that cache is spread across the cores, and the app only uses one core, what matters is the amount of cache single core has. It has four times the cache, but that cache is spread to several cores, and it has twice as many cores as the dual hase.

If they say that "UT is propably faster because Quad has 4 times the cache", they should then also say "UT is propably faster because Quad has twice as many processor-cores as the dual has". But they can't say just one, and not the other. And in any case, since UT does not use multiple processors, what matter is the specs of the individual core.

[ksz]

Macsales ram is made by Samsung. Do they make a RAM chip?
Sai
Absolutely. Samsung is probably the world's biggest DRAM maker and they are frequently at the leading edge of memory design.

[aquafina]

If they say that "UT is propably faster because Quad has 4 times the cache", they should then also say "UT is propably faster because Quad has twice as many processor-cores as the dual has". But they can't say just one, and not the other. And in any case, since UT does not use multiple processors, what matter is the specs of the individual core.

Well said...finally someone used their brain before they used their fingers.

[Mord]

UT does acctually use multiple cpu's the sound is offloaded to the second cpu, however compared a quad to a dual makes no difference, what we should care about is weather the 970MP has a shared 2MB cache or seperate 1MB caches if the former then one core can effectively have 4x the cache of the 970FX.