[phobos]

Yesterday I have done a very simple test with a friend of mine who owns an XP1800.The tests were simple and weren't based on real life situations but they show a very good performance for the G4's.If my powerbook can perform that well than the dual G4's on the powermac can really outperform the current intel and athlon chips.

MP3 encoding. The cd was written on the hard disk and then encoded on mp3 format.It's not what you do in real life but in this way we excluded the slow combo drive that I knew I had and concentrated on the real power of the encoding.Mp3's encoded at 192.
Athlon 7:55
Powerbook: 7:50

Then we have done a photoshop test.We are going to repeat the tests with some real life actions and see what comes up.We know made a lot of filter tests that we both don't use at all but at this time we were on a hurry.Both systems have 512MB memory.I remind you that Athlon has also the faster DDR memory.Athlon uses a 7200rpm disk as scratch and powerbook also uses external 7200rpm disk as scratch.
Convert image from 72 dpi to a 300dpi image and at an additional resolution of 5000pixels width.

Image size:
Athlon: 5"
Powerbook: 6"

Free Transform
Athlon: 1: 27
Powerbook: 1: 22

Convert RGB to CMYK
Athlon: 18"
Powerbook: 29"

Unsharp Mask
Athlon: 1: 39
Powerbook: 1:28

Mosaic
Athlon: 42"
Powerbook: 59

Sumi-E (A filter that I have used for the first time in my life....)
Athlon: 55"
Powerbook: 3minutes 27seconds (!!!!!!)

Powerbook won in 2 out of 6 tests on the photoshop tests we did and scored quite close to the athlon on the rest of the tests except the SumiE filter where we saw a near 4x faster times on the athlon.

Then we did a cinebench test where athlon clearly outperformed the powerbook.(Graphic card used on the athlon Ati radeon 9000 something.Sorry I can't remember now the exact number.I'll post it later)



Shading Cinema4d
Athlon 13.15 Powerbook 5,88

Shading Open Gl
Athlon 27 Powerbook 7,59

Raytracing
Athlon 20.88 Powerbook 8,30

I think that the humble 667 powerbook performed quite well.And I might add that photoshop in 10.2 is slower than in 10.1.5 ... So the photoshop tests could be a lot better if photoshop was properly written for the os.
I think this is impressive stuff here.
So to every one out there who are whining about mac being outperformed by intel and athlon read this and be happy...
I can't find a reason why a dual800 powermac with the same graphic card as the athlon wouldn't outperform it!!!! Of course I'm talking about the 2(MP3 encoding and photoshop test) out of 3 tests. Athlon would certainly outperform the powermac on the 3d department but not with that many points.

[Eug]

I should point out of course that MP3 encoding speed depends upon the software and the encoding algorithm. There are very slow ones and there are very fast ones, not to mention the fact that there are various settings you can use for each.

Photoshop is a different story. Many filters are very Altivec'd and thus do well on the G4. Indeed, it's no surprise that it was Photoshop that was selected by Apple for its ad campaign. Unfortunately, Photoshop is a bit of an anomaly.

A fast G4 Mac will do very well for certain tasks, but to call it blazing fast compared to an Athlon overall would not be warranted.

[KidRed]

Originally posted by Eug:
I should point out of course that MP3 encoding speed depends upon the software and the encoding algorithm. There are very slow ones and there are very fast ones, not to mention the fact that there are various settings you can use for each.

Photoshop is a different story. Many filters are very Altivec'd and thus do well on the G4. Indeed, it's no surprise that it was Photoshop that was selected by Apple for its ad campaign. Unfortunately, Photoshop is a bit of an anomaly.

A fast G4 Mac will do very well for certain tasks, but to call it blazing fast compared to an Athlon overall would not be warranted.

Photoshop is not an anomaly if you use it 10 hours a day like I do.

[Eug]

Actually, it'd probably be better to say that Macs do very well on certain Altivec'd Photoshop filters. Whether you happen to use those filters or not is a different question. If not, then then an Athlon may still be significantly faster.

I'm not saying Macs are bad. I am just saying that the first post in this thread is a little overly optimistic in its G4 comparison vs. the Athlon.

[seanyepez]

AltiVec is actually awesome for applications accellerated for it. I think it's one of the more useful sets of SIMD sets out there.

What you didn't include was what kind/type of RAM the Athlon XP 1800+ has, the operating system it is running, and the chipset your machine uses. Stats on the PowerBook will also help to confirm the reliability of your statistics, too.

[phobos]

I'll be back with some more results and the full specs of the athlon system and mine.
Sean what kind of stats do you want? Every question you have please post it and I'll try to reply it.Also if you have some other kind of test in mind tell me so to do it.

To sum it up.
I'll post the full specs of the athlon and the powerbook system.
The programs used for mp3 encoding.(We tried it with 2 different programs on the PC side and the results were very simillar)
An action set for photoshop that uses more frequent actions and also some tests on DVD decoding.

[seanyepez]

I just want to know how much/what type of memory the systems are using.

[phobos]

Both systems have 512MB of Ram.Athlon has DDR 333MHz.The graphics card on the athlon side is Ati Radeon 9000 Pro.It's not manufactured by Ati but by 3byte or something like that.OS used on the PC Windows 2000 Service Pack 5(If I remember correctly). Powerbook runs 10.2.1 and also has 512MB of ram.

Tommorow I hope I'll have some more tests. I don't know about you guys but if the results are as good as the previous results I will be very happy about my machine.

[seanyepez]

Sounds fair. Thanks for clarifying that.