Aperture 3 - resource hog?

you really should give the demo a try, I don't find it a resource hog, but then it's on a mac pro with 12gb of RAM and it seems to like that, but there have been more reports of it being RAM hungry, but i'd try it to see what you think, but considering the cost I find it value for money and very good at what it does, I'm looking the other way, now LR4 is released i'm thinking of getting that now.......... I may run it alongside aperture, not sure yet

 

No, I think they're both about the same.
The reason is simple: just loading a folder/project/album with, say, 100 RAW photos is going to take a substantial amount of RAM. The RAW files of my D7000 weigh in at ~20 MB each. Take that times 100 and you need 2 GB to just load and store the photos in RAM without doing anything to them. Those images still need to be processed.

Since up until recently, hard drives were among the bottle necks (with SSDs it has gotten a lot better), Aperture and Lightroom use different strategies to hide this from the user. So in essence, you need at least 4 GB RAM, better 8 GB, otherwise you won't be happy. (According to your first post, you do, so you're all set.)

Then you won't like Aperture either since it works exactly in the same way. Aperture and Lightroom never touch the original, but only write changes to small »text« files which are then used as »recipes« to render the original. And that's a good thing in my opinion, the reason why Aperture/Lightroom are as successful as they are is because they never touch the original and all edits are non-destructive. All you need to do is export a photo from Aperture/Lightroom to have the alterations to the original rendered into a file.

 

I'm using the trial version (hoping the new version comes out before my trial runs out) with a 13" MBP and 4GB RAM. Its a little slow, but useable. I ordered an 8GB RAM upgrade, hopefully it will speed it up a bit.

 

I have 8GB on the previous generation of MBP (2.1Ghz i5). Aperture runs fine.

 

That's not how Aperture works.
Aperture works as I described. The tiff files are only created if you edit files in an external editor such as Photoshop. Then Aperture will render a file to tiff (or psd, depending on your prefs), serve it to the image editing application. Once you save the file in the image editor, Aperture will start using the edited file. However, once you make a single edit in Aperture on top of this edited file, it is once again done non-destructively. There is no difference to Lightroom in that respect.

What you probably have in mind is the integration between Lightroom and Photoshop, given that the versions of both apps are compatible. Then Lightroom does not need to render the edited file to a tiff, but it can give Photoshop the original file and the »text file« which contains all the edits the user has done on top. The reason this works is because Photoshop and Lightroom both use the same RAW processing engine.

 

Just an update- I installed the new RAM and it's much faster now.