[cla]

I posted this question in a half-dead thread, given no adequate answer:

1. How long does it take you guys to fire up Adobe Reader 6.0, on a newly rebooted unswapped iMac G5? (Time from the double click on the Reader icon until the app is fully loaded.)

2. I know people will mind me posting this one, but it is of major importance as I face a major investment:
Rumours are that iMac G5 may perform sluggish coping with the new graphics in the next major release of Mac OS X, Tiger.
Can anyone who has installed any of the betas on an iMac G5 just confirm/deny this?


I don't want to go for that new PowerMac G5 1.8 as I value the iMac's 20" TFT (I do a lot of graphics work). It's that mis-choosen graphics card that makes me feel kinda unhorny.

[MacShodan]

1. Well, I can't really tell, I use Preview instead of Acrobat it works fine for me.

2. I think it's too early to say, especially because all the tiger previews has come out before imac g5 would show up. S maybe it's not even implemented yet a full support for the new machine. Btw, the graphic subsystem of the new iMac is the same of the bottom line of PowerMac G5, so you should have basically the same performances. Of course if you put a 9800 on the powermac you'll have morenative functions by core image/video. But do you really think will be wise for Apple to put a product on the market 5 months before tiger will ship that is not fully compatibile with it?

[poochg3]

Core Image is supported by the new iMac G5 - the following is a clip from their website page referencing this new feature in Tiger.

Supported graphics cards:


ATI Radeon 9800 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 XT
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra

These cards are available in today’s PowerBooks, Power Mac G5s and both the 17-inch and 20-inch iMac.

Granted the iMac is the bottom of the barrell when it comes to total compatibility but Core Image does scale to meet your GPU's capabilities. In other words the new iMac will be fine.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html

[hldan]

Originally posted by cla:
I posted this question in a half-dead thread, given no adequate answer:

1. How long does it take you guys to fire up Adobe Reader 6.0, on a newly rebooted unswapped iMac G5? (Time from the double click on the Reader icon until the app is fully loaded.)

2. I know people will mind me posting this one, but it is of major importance as I face a major investment:
Rumours are that iMac G5 may perform sluggish coping with the new graphics in the next major release of Mac OS X, Tiger.
Can anyone who has installed any of the betas on an iMac G5 just confirm/deny this?


I don't want to go for that new PowerMac G5 1.8 as I value the iMac's 20" TFT (I do a lot of graphics work). It's that mis-choosen graphics card that makes me feel kinda unhorny.

I have the 1.33Ghz Powerbook and it takes roughly 4-5 seconds to start up Adobe Reader from a cold boot (at highest performance) and 1 second to re-launch after it's cached. The older Acrobat app started up faster from a cold boot because it had far less plug ins to load than Adobe Reader. The Windows version starts up slow the same way on a P4.

[SSharon]

So a 64mb Radeon 9000 pro is not compatible with core image? Thats nuts as there are so many of these cards out in the MDD machines.

[nJm]

The current iBook's 32mb ATi Radeon 9200 isn't suported either.

[the_glassman]

Originally posted by nJm:
The current iBook's 32mb ATi Radeon 9200 isn't suported either.

No 32 MB card is supported as far as I know. The eMac doesn't meet those requirments either. Apple missed the boat with the recent iBook update. The slight speed bump was nice, but I would have purchased a new one if it had the Go 5200

[Landos Mustache]

You girls want to tell me why you need Core Image and what it does exactly?

[the_glassman]

Originally posted by Landos Mustache:
You girls want to tell me why you need Core Image and what it does exactly?

Core Image

[Landos Mustache]

Originally posted by the_glassman:
Core Image

Yes I see that. Now you tell me why you need it so badly on your computer and what will it do for your needs?

All you need is Quartz Extreme and even that doesn't make much of a difference.

[BrunoBruin]

Originally posted by cla:
1. How long does it take you guys to fire up Adobe Reader 6.0, on a newly rebooted unswapped iMac G5? (Time from the double click on the Reader icon until the app is fully loaded.)

Reader is dog-slow on everything, including my dual-2.5. You can speed up launches by turning off (or deleting) languages you don't need. Click the icon and hit File > Get Info and click the disclosure triangle next to Languages. They are all turned on by default. Deleting additional languages helped me a lot. Or just use Preview, which is even faster.
Edit: this is in Reader 5.0, I don't know what the default is in 6.0.

[cla]

I have the 1.33Ghz Powerbook and it takes roughly 4-5 seconds to start up Adobe Reader from a cold boot (at highest performance)

Still no iMac G5 owners have responded, but the quote above would imply I can expect better than 4-5 seconds, which sounds really promising...

Unfortunately, Preview isn't an option for me as I'm a developer at http://www.re-pdf.com. Anyway, thanks for all your answers ( so far :> ).

edit: removed a . in the url...

[PBG4 User]

Originally posted by Landos Mustache:
Yes I see that. Now you tell me why you need it so badly on your computer and what will it do for your needs?

All you need is Quartz Extreme and even that doesn't make much of a difference.

How do you purport to know what I need? Especially when other then Dashboard, Apple hasn't shown us the full value of CI/CV?

Personally as a fledgling developer, I see CI/CV adding some serious grunt to any image/video manipulation program for very little programming effort. Of course, I'll need a GPU that can support CI/CV to be able to do all this cool stuff in real time.

Of course, you probably think that Apple won't be using CI in the next version of iPhoto, or CV in the next versions of iMovie, FCE & FCP. I mean, why would Apple develop this cool API to do image and video manipulation in real time, then actually go through the trouble of using it in their next program versions. According to you, all I need is Quartz Extreme, right?

Stop telling people that just because you can't see a use for something, no one else could possibly have a use for it.

[PBG4 User]

Originally posted by cla:
Still no iMac G5 owners have responded, but the quote above would imply I can expect better than 4-5 seconds, which sounds really promising...

Unfortunately, Preview isn't an option for me as I'm a developer at http://www.re-pdf.com. Anyway, thanks for all your answers ( so far :> ).

edit: removed a . in the url...

Probably most users haven't responded because:
a) Opening the program only wastes about 5 seconds of life.
b) Once it's opened, one doesn't need to shut it down, but
c) If you do need to shut down (due to Adobe Reader memory leaks or something) the program is cached and will now waste maybe 1 second more of your life.

Seriously, even if you restart Reader 20x per day and say each restart takes 5 seconds, that's 100 seconds, or just over 1.5 minutes. Are you saying that getting this down to say 80 seconds would be the difference between make or break for you?

I mean really, if you want me to time how long it takes Reader to load on my iMac, I'll think about it. I just don't reboot that often. Hell, it takes much longer to reboot to test how long Reader opens then it would take to open/close/reopen Reader many many times.

[edit]
Besides, wouldn't testing Acrobat be more beneficial for you? I mean, you have to develop in Acrobat, not in Reader, correct?

[Landos Mustache]

Originally posted by PBG4 User:
How do you purport to know what I need? Especially when other then Dashboard, Apple hasn't shown us the full value of CI/CV?

Stop telling people that just because you can't see a use for something, no one else could possibly have a use for it.

Never said such a thing regarding nobody needs it and even you show that you have no clue as to why it is or why you might need it.

YES it might be used on FCP but do you really thing people who need top speed using FCP are using low end iMac's and iBooks.

People are bitching for the sake of bitching. They don't even know what it does, how much time it might save yet they know they absolutely need it.

[cla]

Originally posted by PBG4 User:
[B]Probably most users haven't responded because:
a) Opening the program only wastes about 5 seconds of life.
Seriously, even if you restart Reader 20x per day and say each restart takes 5 seconds, that's 100 seconds, or just over 1.5 minutes. Are you saying that getting this down to say 80 seconds would be the difference between make or break for you?

On toti's dual G5 1.8 (1.5 GB RAM) it takes 8 seconds. I'm getting ONE cpu and 1/6 of his amount of ram.

If Acrobat uses both cpu's to start, for what I know, it could take 16 seconds or more. Add InDesign. Add Illustrator. Add Photoshop.

That WOULD pose the difference between make or break - I could buy a PC twice as fast for half the price.

Besides, wouldn't testing Acrobat be more beneficial for you? I mean, you have to develop in Acrobat, not in Reader, correct?

For me, yes. I figure not a lot of people here have Adobe Professional installed.

If it takes 5 seconds or less, consider me a switcher. All I need is a confirmation (as which I interpret your response).

[P]

Originally posted by the_glassman:
No 32 MB card is supported as far as I know. The eMac doesn't meet those requirments either. Apple missed the boat with the recent iBook update. The slight speed bump was nice, but I would have purchased a new one if it had the Go 5200

Perhaps, but I bet that that (32 MB) is not the problem. Core Image is going to use the onboard shaders (pixel shader and vertex shader), so those shaders have to be programmable. The first generation of ATi chips with fully programmable shaders (DX9 compability is what the Wintel people call it) is the 9x00s. The 9200 is not of the same generation as the 9600 and 9800 - it's an old 8500. All the nVidia boards beginning with a 5 are the same generation of the GPU, so the 5200 fits. The same goes for the next generation, btw: The 6x00s from nVidia all have the 6th generation of the GPU, while only the X700 and X800 from ATi are the latest generation. The X600 is a 9600 ported to PCIe. The X300 is the same 9600, but downclocked and crippled.

As for why Apple didn't switch... If you look back among Apple's All-in-one and portable designs, you'll notice that they don't switch between ATi and nVidia all that often. They can switch when the rip out the entire chipset - like with the first iMac G4 - but not necessarily otherwise. The chipsets likely only support one family of graphics chips.

[P]

Originally posted by Landos Mustache:
Yes I see that. Now you tell me why you need it so badly on your computer and what will it do for your needs?

All you need is Quartz Extreme and even that doesn't make much of a difference.

Need it badly? No. But it's nice to have - anything that offloads the main CPU and the main processor bus is good.

[Landos Mustache]

So nobody here can explain why they need Core Image or what it will do for them.

[Pierre B.]

Originally posted by Landos Mustache:
So nobody here can explain why they need Core Image or what it will do for them.

I think it has been already clearly stated. It is an API. As such, it is up to developers to provide applications that make use of this API. We(I) don't know in what extend Apple would have use it by the time Tiger hits the market. But the idea is that Core Image/Video will permit developers to access, while programming, the graphics subsystem using higher level language (so very easy). Given the power of the current graphics cards/chips, this translates into "development of software doing advanced graphics/image manipulations directly in the graphics card, is going to be very easy". This is perhaps of critical importance for smaller developers which do not have the resources to code directly for the graphics card.

It is about software development that will change the user experience, since the graphics chip (much faster in its domain than a CPU) will be used to manipulate graphics and video with little involvement from the CPU. That's all. And it's BIG.

[PBG4 User]

Originally posted by Landos Mustache:
YES it might be used on FCP but do you really thing people who need top speed using FCP are using low end iMac's and iBooks.

People are bitching for the sake of bitching. They don't even know what it does, how much time it might save yet they know they absolutely need it.

Maybe you forget that a year ago 1.8GHz G5 single processor computers were $2500 from Apple. You think the G5 in the new iMac is of lower quality or something? How about 2 years ago when people were using ~1GHz G4 computers?

Not everyone who uses FCE or FCP is a hollywood shop, which is the beauty of these programs. With the new iMacs having G5 chips, speedy RAM busses & 2GB max. storage (not to mention a beautiful screen) they certainly can't be called low-end computers, even with the 5200 Ultra.

I know what CI/CV is used for and I'm sure you'll see its functionality added into the iLife programs. Maybe not 1/2005, but by 1/2006 you'll see CI in iPhoto and CV in iMovie, FCE, & FCP. CI/CV is HUGE. I can add image tweaking abilities to my programs without having to code my own gaussian blur routine, or rotate, size, crop & all the other functions added through these new APIs.

Maybe you don't know about it, but there's plenty of documentation on it starting here --> http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html . There's also some more info here --> http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/ .

[hldan]

Originally posted by cla:
On toti's dual G5 1.8 (1.5 GB RAM) it takes 8 seconds. I'm getting ONE cpu and 1/6 of his amount of ram.

If Acrobat uses both cpu's to start, for what I know, it could take 16 seconds or more. Add InDesign. Add Illustrator. Add Photoshop.

That WOULD pose the difference between make or break - I could buy a PC twice as fast for half the price.




For me, yes. I figure not a lot of people here have Adobe Professional installed.

If it takes 5 seconds or less, consider me a switcher. All I need is a confirmation (as which I interpret your response).

Sorry I was under the impression that you were inquiring about Adobe Reader. If you are asking about Adobe Acrobat then it does take about 8 seconds to launch from a cold boot using my Powerbook 1.33Ghz G4. I totally understand that you want your new computer to be as zippy as possible but these apps open the same on any new PC so it's not like this should be your real reason for deciding to go with the iMac G5.

How fast 3rd Party apps open up should not be your deciding factor as to buying the iMac or not.

[ApeInTheShell]

If you are using Adobe Professional, Indesign, Photoshop..etc than the iMac is not the right computer for you. Sure it lasts quite a long time but these applications are going to require more, more, more, more!! and more. So save yourself the time and buy a Power Mac.

I see the iBook and eMac as low end computers and the iMac as midrange.

Regarding Tiger, you should cool your jets and check out the developer section. You might get an idea of what Core Video/Image is all about this coming year. The iMac passes the requirements so why worry?

[hldan]

Originally posted by ApeInTheShell:
If you are using Adobe Professional, Indesign, Photoshop..etc than the iMac is not the right computer for you. Sure it lasts quite a long time but these applications are going to require more, more, more, more!! and more. So save yourself the time and buy a Power Mac.

I see the iBook and eMac as low end computers and the iMac as midrange.

Regarding Tiger, you should cool your jets and check out the developer section. You might get an idea of what Core Video/Image is all about this coming year. The iMac passes the requirements so why worry?

Sorry, but that's not logical saying the iMac is not the right computer when it comes to these apps. The G5 tower is not the answer anyway. If you get the iMac G5 1.8 and then decide to go for the G5 tower 1.8 then it won't be a major upgrade in performance anyway and as far as upgrades you won't be able to upgrade the processor for future apps. All the Adobe apps run great on all the G4's starting at 1Ghz.

If it's all about high end professional encoding then a PowerMac is the answer but you'll get better performance with DP models and preferrably 2.0-2.5 Ghz.
The iMac is a very powerful machine and uses faster ram up to 2GB so it's a great choice for even the prosumer.

[UnixMac]

yeah, if an app runs well on a 1.0 G4, it should smoke on the G5 iMac... Unless your RAM is down at 256MB or something? I bought one for my mom with 1GB (the 1.6) and I loaded FCP 3 on it, and it ran quite a bit faster than my previous dual 500 G4 with 1.5GB RAM. Unless you're doing some heavy CPU/GPU intensive apps (certain games, Maya, Motion, FCP encoding, etc..), the dual G5's aren't going to be noticeably faster on most apps.. The biggest advantage the tower has is bandwidth... bus speed, and expansion.

As a matter of fact using the finder, the iMac seemed faster for me... but that could have been an illusion of the 17" screen size difference.

Finally, I am completely unimpressed with the latest implementation of Adobe Acrobat.. Adobe is starting to get lazy in their coding as I am sure this software is not G5 optimized at all, and certainly not dual cpu aware.. it's down right slow. I use preview to read and Print tab to compose.

[cla]

Originally posted by UnixMac:
Finally, I am completely unimpressed with the latest implementation of Adobe Acrobat.. Adobe is starting to get lazy in their coding as I am sure this software is not G5 optimized at all, and certainly not dual cpu aware.. it's down right slow. I use preview to read and Print tab to compose.

I know what you mean. The fact that Reader contains a lot of code that is never run (unless you use a special Adobe forms server PDF) bugs me the most. I guess they were a bit too optimistic in planning their e-forms/workflow world dominance...

To be frank I'm not sure I'd want Apple's Preview to support all the PDF features. That would only imply that also PDF's have to be desiged for multiple browsers.

Acrobat 7.0 is out for beta testing, and I hear it's much faster than the previous versions.

[ApeInTheShell]

Hidan....thank you Mr. Spock that will be all.