AMD 2000+ vs Dual 1.8Ghz G5?

[Rob587]

Currently I have a computer with an AMD 2000+ and I am looking to head over to the mac world. Will the dual 1.8Ghz G5 be faster than what I have now overall and for games?... How much better would a dual 2Ghz G5 be then the two?

I tried looking for the bench speed things, but I dont know much about that stuff.

thanks,
Rob

 

[ReanimationLP]

For games like Doom 3, the AXP would be a lot faster. Everything else though, the G5 would beat the pants off of it

 

[mduser63]

FWIW, I have an Athlon XP 2000+ which I've been using for video editing for 3 years (was very expensive when I bought it). I bought my first Mac (PowerBook) six months ago, and a week ago I got Dual 1.8 GHz G5 PowerMac and the Apple Production Suite (Final Cut Pro, etc) for video editing. Now realize that I've only had the G5 for a week, and honestly haven't had as much time to use it as I'd like, but right off the bat it feels much faster than the old Athlon 2000+. Rendering and compressing video in particular is much faster, compared to Adobe Premiere on the PC. Honestly though, even if the Mac was slower than the 3 year old PC, I'd consider it an upgrade because Mac OS X is so much better than Windows.

I can't answer your question about games specifically because I don't play computer games (that's what my PS2 is for), but I would imagine that game performance would be somewhat similar, but would depend largely on the graphics card in your Mac. The stock graphics card in the dual 1.8 is not all that great, but you can upgrade it when you buy it or later if you want. I'm using the stock 64 MB 5200, and it's fine for me, but again, I don't play computer games.

 

[Little Endian]

http://barefeats.com/macvpc.html

While not exactly comparing the Dual 1.8 G5 to a AthlonXP 2000+ these benchmarks can give you a general idea. These benches put the Dual 2.5Ghz G5 up against a Dual Opteron (252) 2.6Ghz setup as well as the Athlon FX55 2.6Ghz. You should be able to scale the results to match your setup. A Dual Opteron or Athlon FX55 leave your old Athlon XP 2000+ in the dust and the G5 can compare well against them. Scaling from the Graphs one would speculate that a Dual 1.8Ghz G5 should be able to hold it's own against an Opteron 248 or Athlon FX51 setup in most scenarios besides gaming. Although Gaming on the G5 might be faster or at least equal to your Athlon XP 2000+ depending on what kind of GPU you have.
Remember the G5 gets owned by newer Athlon 64 and FX series chips but they can perform reasonobly on par with the older Athlon XP series chips in many instances. Remember gaming Performance may improve over time with additional OS and driver updates

 

[ffakr]

XP 2000+ is an old dog

It might guide you better if you think of the XP not in terms of the performace rating, but in terms of the actual clock speed. A 2000+ is actually running at 1.67GHz. It can't run as many operations per clock cycle as a G5 and the DDR bus on the XP is much slower than the bus found on the G5. As an athlon owner (I've got two running athon boxes actually) I can assure you the G5 is vastly superior in every way (aside from the fact you won't play windows games on it).

There are issues with gaming though. Games are very difficult to write with pervasive threading. That basically means that there are almost no games that support multiple CPUs. The Quake3 engine was the last to offer real support. UT2004 supports dual cpus but ONLY by running the audio on the second cpu. The graphics (part of them), the physics, the AI all run on one CPU. Since the OS is SMP aware, it will push other OS processes to the second cpu to load balance, but the game engine doesn't make very good use of both CPUs.
When comparing the cpus for gaming, you have to look at the inherent diffences of the CPU and really compare one 1.67GHz athlon to one PPC 970 (G5). The G5 is still superior but the whole Dual G5 thing is slightly misleading.

Also, the quality of video drivers isn't as high as on the PC platform. There isn't the same competitive-ness in the Mac market. Nvidia and ATI aren't locked in mortal combat so the speed of the drivers isn't under constant tweeking. Apple's video drivers are rock solid but they could be more optimised.

That said, as a registered developer (not that I develop much) I can tell you that Apple is taking Game development and OpenGL peformance VERY seriously right now. Things will be better with Tiger and they will continue to improve significantly throughout the year.

I think you'll be very happy with your dual G5. Just realize, in games you won't see the full performance of the box yet. It will play games just fine (I 'borrow' the dual G5 from the office when I have LAN parties in my house and it rocks) but there's more to come.
Just approach this realisticly. A dual 1.8 G5 may not be as fast as an Athlon64 3600+ in games but over all, I'd certainly take the dual G5. OS X is a pleasure to use while Windows and Linux are like being in combat with your computer and the rest of the world.

just my 2cents.
ffakr.