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PowerMac G4 - Most Powerful Personal Computer of it's day, am I missing something?

MrCheeto

MrCheeto

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Nov 2, 2008
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What is the deal with my experience with the G4? I'm not expecting it to decode the human genome in seven seconds and do backflips, but if I remember correct, when Jobs introduced the G4 at the turn of the century, he and the audience were going absolute NUTS over its performance.

Specifically, I remember him encoding a video in real time! I'm sorry, I've tried every size and format, but a twenty-eight minute video that takes two and a half hours to export is FUH-HAR from real time.

In the Xbench tests, the machine sure comes alive, performing all those floating point operations it was designed to, but in this instance it just doesn't make sense to me.

What am I missing? Is it simply an OS 9 thing? Were they using some super efficient top secret software? How do I encode video in real time?

What is the fastest most efficient way to change a media file's format?
 
robbieduncan

robbieduncan

Moderator emeritus
Jul 24, 2002
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Harrogate
He encoded a video using as-then state of the art codecs. They were much, much less CPU intensive to encode than current codecs. If you want real-time encoding either get hardware that is current or use codecs from 10 years ago and accept the lower quality and larger filesizes.
 
MrCheeto

MrCheeto

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Original poster
Nov 2, 2008
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That's what I was hoping to hear.

What filetypes do you think the Mission Impossible Trailer could have been in in 1999? It was good quality, probably TV quality although widescreen.

Current hardware? My MacBook Pro encodes in 3x real time with almost every file format, but that's irrelevant to this situation.
 
reel2reel

reel2reel

macrumors 6502a
Jul 24, 2009
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Probably Sorenson 3 or 4. I remember using Squeeze back then, which became a progressively more lame piece of software until (I think) it disappeared from the face of the earth.
 
MrCheeto

MrCheeto

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Nov 2, 2008
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SORENSON?! Now that's a name I've not heard in a looong time, a long time.

Hell, I completely forgot about it!

Worth a shot! I'll see what they offer for OS X! Thanks!
 
slughead

slughead

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Apr 28, 2004
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MrCheeto said:
when Jobs introduced the G4 at the turn of the century, he and the audience were going absolute NUTS over its performance.

Specifically, I remember him encoding a video in real time!
Click to expand...

Apple, particularly in the G4 days, fudged their stats and demos to stupidly insane extent.

I remember people benching the G4 iMac were getting numbers so wildly different from Apple's (presented at the keynote, btw), Apple.com literally changed them without a word!

I remember the G4 supposedly having all these "flaups" and there was this "megahertz myth." Apple dumped full page propaganda in tech mags about it. While they had a point, at the end of the day, the x86 processors were cheaper and faster at nearly everything. Then Apple switched to IBM (better but ran incredibly hot [see liquid cooled powermac]), and you know the rest.
 
MrCheeto

MrCheeto

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Original poster
Nov 2, 2008
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I don't know about that, in my experience my 1ghz Pentium III's were only so far ahead of my G3 iMac, and the iMac ALWAYS performed smoother, system-wise. Even after using Linux on the Pentiums.

As well, my 2005 2ghz AMD machine is a crapper, whereas the 2003 PowerMac G4 1.25ghz is just a zippin' along...

If their scores are so off, how do they get away with it? And where the hell are they getting these numbers? And wasn't Steve using a REAL machine in real time to demonstrate the capabilities?
 
Consultant

Consultant

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
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slughead said:
Apple, particularly in the G4 days, fudged their stats and demos to stupidly insane extent.

I remember people benching the G4 iMac were getting numbers so wildly different from Apple's (presented at the keynote, btw), Apple.com literally changed them without a word!...
Click to expand...

Got anything to actually support what you are saying?
 
slughead

slughead

macrumors 68040
Apr 28, 2004
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MrCheeto said:
If their scores are so off, how do they get away with it?
Click to expand...

They didn't... Like I said, other benchmarkers like Barefeats.com called them out on it.

Consultant said:
Got anything to actually support what you are saying?
Click to expand...

The whole deal is right here:

http://www.barefeats.com/imacg5b.html

edit: They even barred him from the apple store

MrCheeto said:
And wasn't Steve using a REAL machine in real time to demonstrate the capabilities?
Click to expand...

Mostly I'm talking about their "numbers" and not demos. However, as discussed earlier, demos depend a lot on which software you choose to demonstrate.

G5 benchmarks example

It's really common in the tech industry to rig benchmarks. I remember ATI had a driver out that would detect if "Quake3.exe" were running, and then alter the settings without the user knowing it. If you changed it to "Quack3.exe", the settings would be as selected.


http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/1
 
MrCheeto

MrCheeto

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Original poster
Nov 2, 2008
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And for ONLY $499!!!

Expletives...well, at least it still rocks the Quake III!
 
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