digital imaging - Mac vs. PC

[mdouglas]

Dear Gang,

This may be old news to some of you, but it's new to me and I couldn't find a link to a thread about it here in this forum.

Last month Rob Galbrieath did a comparison between the Mac and PC in terms of processing RAW files from digital cameras. Though I'm well aware of the speed advantage that PCs currently enjoy, I was surprised at how much better the PCs performed than the Macs.

Here's the link:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0301/03011002robgpcmaccomp.asp

Comments?

Mark

 

[Mr. Anderson]

Got to love dpreview and their comprehensive tests - especially the multi-tasking one, quite nice.

But the lack of performance of the macs is nothing new. Its why most people here are probably waiting for Apple to move on from the Motorola G4 chip and get something that would do the job a far cry better. At this time it looks like the IBM 970.

Personally, the change couldn't happen soon enough.

D

 

[rundevilrun]

Notice the MacBibble/Bibble for windows results, the Powermac beats everything. The G4 can be a very fast processor when software is optimized for it. I think if Apple would do more to help developers optimize their software the Power Macs would be right up there with any 3GHz P4. Then again, if they did that they probably couldn't have pushed motorola for the new 1.42GHz G4...

 

[Bear]

So when Photoshop is finally OS X only, do you think we'll see a nice speed improvement?

 

[nuckinfutz]

I still think Macs are superior as far as quality.

I think the end of this year and into 2004 that performance mismatch will be fairly over

 

[FelixDerKater]

If you're going to put a top-of-the-line PC in the comparison, why not use the fastest Mac? Why use the 1.25GHz Dual and not the 1.42GHz?

 

[iShater]

It is a very interesting article. The part I really liked was the dual-processor test and the Bibble software package that truelly show how even at lower Mhz ratings, the G4 PPC still goes strong.

I think if you can optimize how you use your PowerMac you can get way more out of it. But running things in the background and continuing other work is not always that simple to plan.

 

[zoetropeuk]

It's not just the processors fault

People need to realise that it doesn't matter how fast our processors are if the Apps we are using are simply ported from the PC without fully utilising the altivec optimisation of the G4.

Theoretically it's possible to see speed gains anywhere up to 1600% or more if you fully optimise the PC app to the G4. Simply using apps such as VAST to auto optimise the code for altivec should see gains anywhere up-to 400%.

If you take the worst case scenario and just double the figures in that speed comparison then the Dual 1.25 would smoke the PC. Then multiply those figures by 16 and that will give you a truer indication of the power of the G4.

I've been working on porting a PC app to run only on OSX and only on the G4, by hand optimising the code as well as I know how and so far it's running at around 10-12 times faster. The mac port that is already available is actually 4-5 times slow on the mac than PC.

It's unfortunate that even apple has to develop apps that can run on both the G3 and G4. Apple needs to ditch the G3 and altivec enable ALL the iAPP's otherwise our dual G4's aint G4's at all.