Apple buyout of Alias|Wavefront

[Mr. Anderson]

Originally posted by wchamlet
I'm of the mind that Apple has got something in the works for the Highend workstation. I don't know if it's a G5, bus speed increase, or quad processor motherboard, but I do know that I cannot wait until July to find out.

Well, you won't. The rack servers are coming out on Monday. But I don't think there will be a buyout of A/W any time soon, that whole rumor was spawned because of the price reduction, not a buy out. Apple needs to make bigger inroads to the high end systems, the new servers might help. Come back in a year and we'll see what the state of the mac is then.

 

[wchamlet]

I honostly don't care wether or not Apple purchases A|W. What I do care about is why should I purchase the program when it won't perform well on the Apple platform. I can afford to wait till July to see what Apple might have in store for it's future "Desktops Towers". Heck, I can even afford to wait till next year if that's what it takes to get a better hardware unit than whats out right now. Maya for $2,000 bucks is dirt cheap. I will buy it soon. I just hope Apple decides to make a better computer than what they have right now.

 

[Scottgfx]

Originally posted by wchamlet
I honostly don't care wether or not Apple purchases A|W. What I do care about is why should I purchase the program when it won't perform well on the Apple platform. I can afford to wait till July to see what Apple might have in store for it's future "Desktops Towers". Heck, I can even afford to wait till next year if that's what it takes to get a better hardware unit than whats out right now. Maya for $2,000 bucks is dirt cheap. I will buy it soon. I just hope Apple decides to make a better computer than what they have right now.

Well, I think a bit of perspective is required here. "Better" than what? I moved from using Lightwave on the Amiga to the Macintosh when version 5 came out. Lightwave 5 Mac was not a very good product as compared to the PC version, but it gave me much better performance on a PPC 601 than my old 040 based Amiga. Today, Lightwave is still more finely tuned for the PC, but I still choose to use the Mac version. It performs good enough for what I'm doing. But still, the OpenGL on the mac is making great strides. I just upgraded to the Radeon 8500... this just about matches the performance of the PC I've used wih Lightwave. To get the best OpenGL performance on the PC you are still looking at buying a graphics card that costs as much as the software.

Basicly, I feel that OS-X has tons of potential and should give us in the 3D design world, a lot of performance enhancements soon. I agree that the the PC world does provide better performance, right now. I've built a couple of Athlon systems that I find very impressive speedwise. I think Apple has probably been refining their DDR system and will show something soon that will leapfrog rather than just give small incremental speed boosts.

 

[wchamlet]

I know... waiting for the fastest computer will become a never ending process. In all honosty, if Apple just increases the bus speed, and goes to DDr ram, that would probably improve the DP G4 greatly. But, again, I won't be in the market for a new computer until the end of the year... so I can afford to wait for the speed boosts that Apple will induce on it's sytems.

By the way, I'm currently learning Maya PLE on an old G3 B&W 350mhz system. It slows down considerably when I work on heavy models, but I am truly surprised at the responsiveness that is shown during realtime playback of animations and the realtime hardware rendering. Pretty cool for a 4 year old computer.

 

[Visitor]

3D benchmark

Hi,
I was just dropping by and reading some posts about the incredible renderpower G4 has and that there is no comparison to 3D software available on the M$ platform. Oh my, I wish that would be true :-(
Have a look at MAXON CINEMA 4D. It is a german 3D software available for PC and Mac (it started on Amiga and envolved cross platform later on) and it offers a nice (and free available) benchmark application "Cinebench".
Cinema 4D is multi processor enabled and so is a nice application to compare renderpower on PC and Mac.
While the benchmarks per 100 MHz are a little bit better for G4s this doesn't look too good compared to the overall benchmark as PCs have much faster clock speeds and mobos.
So everybody posting Macs are superiour for 3D applications and rendering seem to have no idea what they are talking about. Hopefully ths will change with the G5 and higher clockspeeds for the mobo.
Btw. I use a dual G4 by myself and wish it would be faster on 3D tasks (floating point opperations)...

Cheers,
Visitor

P.S.: I tried Maya for MacOS X and it sucks. Especially the OpenGL performance is not as it should be in such a pro app. I hope that changes with the new Quartz build.