[DeathMan]

Originally posted by skwerrl:
noone has even mentioned the gfx cards being used in this thread...

THAT can impact photoshop by a LOT

Really? I didn't realize that the graphics card had much to do with PS performance. Forgive my ignorance, but how does having a better graphics card speed up Phostoshop filters? Does it actually speed things up, or just make them *feel* faster?

This is a serious question.

[ewoh24]

So forgive me if this is a stupid question, but with all this talk about GHz and FSB's etc...how bottlenecked is my poor 12" PB with a measly 867Mhz G4 with a paltry 133MHz FSB? I simply don't get it how a 867 MHz chip can only be fed 133MHz of data and NOT be considered severely strangled! (And that goes for all the 1+ GHz G4's runing 167MHz busses too...)

[3.1416]

Originally posted by Shaktai:
Funny thing is some folks in other forums are already quoting those as truth. I'll wait for actual tests on a real dual 2.0.

Ugh. I guess I should have added giant flashing disclaimers, but I thought it was obvious. Yes, I fully agree that a real dual 2.0 should have better numbers.

[3.1416]

Originally posted by Eug:
Yeah, I have a tough time believing that a dual 2.0 will reach that Xeon time. I do believe the 119 seconds quoted elsewhere in this thread might be overly conservative though.

So do I. Think of the extrapolated numbers as a lower bound rather than a prediction. I expect a real dual G5 to do better, and would be amazed if it did worse. Also, simply adding the times of each test results in a meaningless number because it's heavily skewed towards the more time-consuming tests.

[skwerrl]

a machine with abetter GPU and twice the VRAM would definitely do better in photoshop benchmarks, and i was wondering what gfx cards were used in the testing of the 1.6s becasue the standard config is with an nvidia geforce fx 5200 ultra, while an ATI radeon 9800 with a better chip and 128MB of DDR VRAM would easily blow the nvidia away.

and these cards also enhance 2D performance along with 3D

[Eug]

Originally posted by ewoh24:
So forgive me if this is a stupid question, but with all this talk about GHz and FSB's etc...how bottlenecked is my poor 12" PB with a measly 867Mhz G4 with a paltry 133MHz FSB? I simply don't get it how a 867 MHz chip can only be fed 133MHz of data and NOT be considered severely strangled! (And that goes for all the 1+ GHz G4's runing 167MHz busses too...)

The 12" PB 867 is potentially quite strangled yes. The TiBook 1 GHz (with the same 133 MHz bus) and the 17" PB 1 GHz (with 167 MHz bus), as well as the G4 PowerMacs, are actually less strangled though, because they have quite a bit of L3 cache to feed them. L3 goes a long way to help out, even though it doesn't eliminate the problems with a slow bus. (Note that though none of the G5s have any L3, because the memory is so fast.)

[ewoh24]

quote:

The 12" PB 867 is very strangled yes. The TiBook 1 GHz (with the same 133 MHz bus) and the 17" PB 1 GHz (with 167 MHz bus), as well as the G4 PowerMacs, are actually less strangled though, because they have quite a bit of L3 cache to feed them. L3 goes a long way to help out, even though it doesn't eliminate the problems with a slow bus. (You'll that though none of the G5s have L3, because the memory is so fast.)

I guess Im confused as to why any manufacturer (this is NOT directed just at Apple) could release a computer with those same stats. What percentage of my processor is just sitting there a majority of the time, waiting for data?
That said, I love my PB. Its absolutely perfect. But now I feel I need the speed of at least a Dual 1.42 G4 PowerMac. I can't seem to get the (mistaken, it seems) notion out of my head that a Dual G4 is at least as powerful as a single 1.6 G5. But it dosent make any difference, really, as the price of the G5 is so much more attractive.

[Durandalus]

Originally posted by 3.1416:
Hmm, let's try some extrapolation. Making the conservative assumptions that a single 2.0 G5 would be 10% faster than the 1.6, and that a dual G5 will scale the same as the dual Athlon, we get this:

Not bad, not great. Slightly faster than the P4, although they're up to 3.2GHz now, and we don't have scores for dual Xeons. Still it's good to be in the same ballpark.

Hmm. MHz-wise alone the single 2.0 GHz is 25% faster and not 10%. Plus it has a slighty faster memory system. Should be much faster than your projected numbers.

[littlegreenspud]

my psbench7 results:

0.7
3.0
2.7
0.8
3.0
4.3
1.2
3.4
3.9
0.9
35.3 (?)
0.9
6.2
6.6
7.5
22.0
19.4
49.3
5.3
35.8
3.7

Dual Gig QS 1.5G RAM Geforce 4Ti

[Eug]

Originally posted by littlegreenspud:
my psbench7 results:

35.3 (?)

Dual Gig QS 1.5G RAM Geforce 4Ti

Something seems fubar'd there. A dual 1.42 does it in something like 3 seconds. Even a revision A iMac with G4/500 upgrade card is much faster than your dual 1 GHz.

[gruhead]

Originally posted by stingerman:
[B]The Opteron's would run slower right now since they could only run photoshop in 32-bit compatibility mode.../B]

Excuse me, but Opteron's 32 bit mode is not *much* slower than it's native mode. The Opteron has 3 modes of operation, 32 bit mode, mixed 32/64 bit mode and pure 64 bit mode. All of these modes are in hardware and not emulated, so there is no performance penalty for mixing modes even.

The Opteron can and will run current 32 bit software just fine and also much faster than any current 32 bit CPU on teh market.

Also the $1000/processor price you quoted is just plain wrong. The Opteron 140, 1.4Ghz, is $265 right now and the high end Opteron 246, 2.0Ghz, is $800.

And, Boxx Technologies, a maker of high end gfx/video workstations, has been offering a dual Opteron workstation since June for ~$3000, which *is* within the G5 desktop price range.

And I'd like to add that Boxx Technologies cases are just as fashionable and functional as Apple's, so it looks great oo

If one were to take the time and effort to assemle a dual Opteron system ones self comparable to the high end G5 PM, I'm sure one to undercut Boxx's price by quite a healthy margin.

[littlegreenspud]

----------------------------------
Something seems fubar'd there. A dual 1.42 does it in something like 3 seconds. Even a revision A iMac with G4/500 upgrade card is much faster than your dual 1 GHz.
----------------------------------

Apart from that one strange result I think that the results are not too bad?

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Ok everyone who uses their computers for real work. Raise your hands if you spend your day throwing complex filters at giant Photoshop documents all day?

Or do you measure performance by how fast and smoothly you get your work done with tons of necessary apps open at once and switching between them?

[Eug]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Ok everyone who uses their computers for real work. Raise your hands if you spend your day throwing complex filters at giant Photoshop documents all day?

Or do you measure performance by how fast and smoothly you get your work done with tons of necessary apps open at once and switching between them?

I was wondering when you'd come in with that comment, since you do the same for every single benchmark thread.

The original poster has already said that performance of some of those filters are extremely important to him, mainly because he does batch actions on hundreds of images. He also says that some images will be several hundred megabytes and thus again, filter performance (eg. unsharp mask or RGB-CMYK) can be very important. I betcha that's one reason why Adobe was so quick to release the G5 plug-in. If performance didn't matter, all the Photoshop pros would still be perfectly happy with G4 450 power Macs and Adobe wouldn't bother with filter optimizations. Oh wait, don't you run a G4 450 Cube, and aren't you going to upgrade to a dual 2.2 GHz G5 rev. B?

Mind you, I agree a lot of the other filters are useless to the majority of the population. Some posters have taken to only reporting the first 12 filters, since everything else is irrelevant to them.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Eug:
. Oh wait, don't you run a G4 450 Cube, and aren't you going to upgrade to a dual 2.2 GHz G5 rev. B?

Bzzzz, wrong. I use my cube for web work which is fine on a 450MHz cube. The problem is running lots of apps at once and switching between them. No filter optimizations will help that.

With the print work I do at work the Dual 1.25 is great for most things as the second prosessor really helps smooth things out. I cannot do most of the print work on the 450 Cube or even the 733 tower is slow for making PDFs.

If someone is doing batch work does it really matter that things are a little faster? I mean you set the machine up and go have lunch, big whoop if it takes an extra 5 minutes.

[action snake]

If someone is doing batch work does it really matter that things are a little faster? I mean you set the machine up and go have lunch, big whoop if it takes an extra 5 minutes. [/B][/QUOTE]


thank you for pointing that out. i don't know why people get all worked up over a couple of seconds or a minute. go smoke a cigarette you
impatient prick, and have a good day.

[Eug]

Well, I don't work with 500 images, but let's say there is a delay of say only 7 seconds per image. That's 3500 seconds, or about a hour. But I agree, for most people a couple of extra seconds per image is no big deal.

In my case it's video not Photoshop. I hate waiting for video to encode (because it takes forever).

[slipjack]

It adds up, snake, it adds up.

Time = Money.

[another_steve]

Originally posted by gruhead:
The Opteron can and will run current 32 bit software just fine and also much faster than any current 32 bit CPU on teh market.

No offense, but instead of adding more conjecture to the Opteron speed debate, how about providing some evidence. From what I've seen so far, the Opteron isn't exactly the steller performer some would like us to believe.

Here's some Opteron Photoshop performance numbers: Not exactly earth shattering, and certain not "faster than any current 32 bit CPU on the market" as you claim.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...eron-1_15.html

Steve

[1_of_9]

skwerrl wrote....

Originally posted by skwerrl:
a machine with abetter GPU and twice the VRAM would definitely do better in photoshop benchmarks, and i was wondering what gfx cards were used in the testing of the 1.6s becasue the standard config is with an nvidia geforce fx 5200 ultra, while an ATI radeon 9800 with a better chip and 128MB of DDR VRAM would easily blow the nvidia away.

and these cards also enhance 2D performance along with 3D

I've got some interesting news for you. What graphics card that is used makes absolutely no differene in PSBench times...not even a fraction of a second, because re-draw times are not even in the benchmark. Thus, your assertion is flat out wrong.

[idyll]

Originally posted by 1_of_9:
skwerrl wrote....



I've got some interesting news for you. What graphics card that is used makes absolutely no differene in PSBench times...not even a fraction of a second, because re-draw times are not even in the benchmark. Thus, your assertion is flat out wrong.

I second that.

[Lars T.]

Originally posted by nil:
For months Boxx has been selling DP Opterons that run Win2K Pro and XP Pro. Opterons 32 and 64 bit code natively ergo any DP aware Windows OS will run them just dandy. Same as how the G5 runs non 64 bit OSX.

PSBench Scores for an Opteron 144. Total Time taken: 141.6s.

[another_steve]

Originally posted by littlegreenspud:
my psbench7 results:

Dual Gig QS 1.5G RAM Geforce 4Ti

We probably don't want this thread to turn into a PS_Bench thread, but for the sake of reference, here were my scores:

My System: Dual 1 Ghz G4 (Mirror Drive), GeForce 4 Ti (not that the video card matters for this test). My scores were recorded on an earlier build of Jaguar when the system was new.

Code:
                        Mine     Yours
Rotate 90+               0.6       0.7
Rotate 9+                2.7       3
Rotate .9+               2.5       2.7
Gaussian Blur 1+         0.7       0.8
Gaussian Blur 3.7+       2.4       3
Gaussian Blur 85+        3.5       4.3
Unsharp 50/1/0+          1.1       1.2
Unsharp 50/3/7/0+        2.8       3.4
Unsharp 50/10/5+         3.4       3.9
Despeckle+               0.9       0.9
RGB-CMYK+                3.8       3.8 ??
Reduce Size 60%+         0.8       0.9
Lens Flare+              5.6       6.2
Color Halftone-          6.3       6.6
NTSC Colors-             7.6       7.5
Accented Edges-         21.7      22
Pointillize+            18.9      19.4
Water Color-            49.8      49.3
Polar Coordinates+       4.9       5.3
Radial Blur+            35.6      35.8
Lighting Effects+        3.4       3.7
Sum                    179       184.4

Steve

[kupan787]

I threw in the Opteropn numbers taken from http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...ron-1_15.html., and bolded fastest results.

Code:
                     Ath   Ath   P4     P4   Ath   2xAth  G5   2xOpt
Test                 3000  2700  3.06   2.8  2200  2200   1.6   244

1 Rotate 90           0.2   0.2   0.2   0.2   0.3   0.3   0.4   0.2
2 Rotate 9            2.8   2.9   2.7   3.3   3.5   2.4   2.7   2.4
3 Rotate .9           2.6   2.6   2.5   3.2   3.3   2.2   2.8   2.2
4 Gaussian Blur 1     0.8   0.8   0.8   0.9   1.1   1.0   0.6   0.7
5 Gaussian Blur 3.7   3.0   2.9   2.0   2.1   3.8   2.4   2.3   2.0
6 Gaussian Blur 85    3.4   3.5   2.3   2.6   4.6   2.9   3.5   2.3
7 Unsharp 50/1/0      1.0   1.1   0.9   1.2   1.3   1.0   1.1   0.8
8 Unsharp 50/3/7/0    3.1   3.1   2.1   2.4   4.0   2.5   2.8   2.2
9 Unsharp 50/10/5     3.1   3.1   2.2   2.4   4.0   2.5   3.4   2.2
10 Despeckle          2.6   2.7   2.2   4.0   3.3   1.9   0.8   2.9
11 RGB-CMYK           8.1   8.2   7.3   9.4  10.0   5.4   4.2   7.4
12 Reduce Size 60%    1.2   1.2   0.9   1.0   1.5   1.1   0.8   1.0
13 Lens Flare         3.9   4.0   2.5   3.8   4.3   3.1   6.0   4.2
14 Color Halftone     2.8   3.3   2.2   2.4   4.3   4.5   4.3   2.6
15 NTSC Colors        2.3   2.4   2.4   2.6   3.1   3.1   4.3   2.4
16 Accented Edges    10.4  10.9  10.9  12.0  13.7  13.9  16.2  12.1
17 Pointillize       17.5  17.7  12.1  18.8  21.3  12.0  25.0  20.1
18 Water Color       22.6  23.6  26.4  29.2  29.4  29.9  35.8  25.7
19 Polar Coordinates  8.0   8.3   7.0   8.5  10.2   6.1   4.9   8.0
20 Radial Blur       46.6  46.9  33.1  43.6  62.7  34.4  54.3  38.2
21 Lighting Effects   2.0   2.0   1.9   2.1   2.5   2.0   3.4   2.0

Total               148.0 151.4 124.6 155.7 192.2 134.6 179.6 141.6

Note I posted the dual scores, as the single was just slightly slower (141.6 for dual vs 143.8 for single)

[RooneyX]

Originally posted by kupan787:
I threw in the Opteropn numbers taken from http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...ron-1_15.html., and bolded fastest results.

Code:
                     Ath   Ath   P4     P4   Ath   2xAth  G5   2xOpt
Test                 3000  2700  3.06   2.8  2200  2200   1.6   244

1 Rotate 90           0.2   0.2   0.2   0.2   0.3   0.3   0.4   0.2
2 Rotate 9            2.8   2.9   2.7   3.3   3.5   2.4   2.7   2.4
3 Rotate .9           2.6   2.6   2.5   3.2   3.3   2.2   2.8   2.2
4 Gaussian Blur 1     0.8   0.8   0.8   0.9   1.1   1.0   0.6   0.7
5 Gaussian Blur 3.7   3.0   2.9   2.0   2.1   3.8   2.4   2.3   2.0
6 Gaussian Blur 85    3.4   3.5   2.3   2.6   4.6   2.9   3.5   2.3
7 Unsharp 50/1/0      1.0   1.1   0.9   1.2   1.3   1.0   1.1   0.8
8 Unsharp 50/3/7/0    3.1   3.1   2.1   2.4   4.0   2.5   2.8   2.2
9 Unsharp 50/10/5     3.1   3.1   2.2   2.4   4.0   2.5   3.4   2.2
10 Despeckle          2.6   2.7   2.2   4.0   3.3   1.9   0.8   2.9
11 RGB-CMYK           8.1   8.2   7.3   9.4  10.0   5.4   4.2   7.4
12 Reduce Size 60%    1.2   1.2   0.9   1.0   1.5   1.1   0.8   1.0
13 Lens Flare         3.9   4.0   2.5   3.8   4.3   3.1   6.0   4.2
14 Color Halftone     2.8   3.3   2.2   2.4   4.3   4.5   4.3   2.6
15 NTSC Colors        2.3   2.4   2.4   2.6   3.1   3.1   4.3   2.4
16 Accented Edges    10.4  10.9  10.9  12.0  13.7  13.9  16.2  12.1
17 Pointillize       17.5  17.7  12.1  18.8  21.3  12.0  25.0  20.1
18 Water Color       22.6  23.6  26.4  29.2  29.4  29.9  35.8  25.7
19 Polar Coordinates  8.0   8.3   7.0   8.5  10.2   6.1   4.9   8.0
20 Radial Blur       46.6  46.9  33.1  43.6  62.7  34.4  54.3  38.2
21 Lighting Effects   2.0   2.0   1.9   2.1   2.5   2.0   3.4   2.0

Total               148.0 151.4 124.6 155.7 192.2 134.6 179.6 141.6

Note I posted the dual scores, as the single was just slightly slower (141.6 for dual vs 143.8 for single)

The G5 looks disappointing. Apple have been claiming over twice the speed for the G4 for a few years and the G5 alone can't do much better than a cheapo Peecee.

[3.1416]

Originally posted by RooneyX:
The G5 looks disappointing.

I don't see how the data supports that assessment. The dual Opteron does look disappointing; it loses to the single P4 (faster in 6 of the tests and slower in 10). Meanwhile even my pessimistic extrapolations for the dual G5 2.0 have it significantly faster than both.

[1_of_9]

[I thought a side by side gleaned from a very old thread (about 14 months
old) on Ars would be interesting to post here. By normalizing the scores
no one subset can skew the results. Tests 15 thru 20 are a useless waste of
time because virtually nobody will ever use them professionally. But -
they are a part of PSBench. Total summed times are not a good indicator
of performance IMO, because literally hundreds of ops in Photoshop are
not being used. "Real world" usage could be argued about ad nauseum. The
Dual G5 scores were posted July 26th but are using G4 optimized code (Not
the G5 Adobe plugin).

Ars linkage
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenT...7760969205&p=1


Boxes are Dual Athlon 1700 and 2400 (1.47 ghz & 2.0 ghz) & G4 DP 1.42ghz,
G4 DP 1.25ghz, G5 1.6ghz, DP G5 2.0 ghz, and a DP 2.4ghz Xeons OC'd to
3.06ghz. I just found this forum and want to state some opinion here. I've
noticed many seem to believe Photoshop is a good benchmark app - I don't.
It simply does not stress the amazingly fast machines we have today. The
first two boxes I own - and never does CPU utilization exceed 80%, and
usally is only goes to 20-35% usage. Second, Photoshop does not do SMP
well - IMO. Someone here claimed 70% increases in speed. Perhaps on a
handful of filters that is true, but in my professional 12+ years of
experience - dual processors usually speed things up on average only 15-30%,
and that is from many, many tests I've done over the last 12 years on both
platforms. I left the mac platform in 1995 at both home and work, and just
started using one again about 6 months ago. I think the G5 looks wonderful
on paper, and I hope it is a hit for Apple. What I'm really curious about
is the G5's video capabilites, because that is one area that will really
stress the whole system. I apoligise in advance if this
formatting doesn't work out...

================================================== =====================
|||||||||||||||||||||2xAth||2xAth||2x G4||2x G4||Single ||2x G5||2x P4x
|||||||||||||||||||||1700+||2400+||1.42g||1.25g||G 5 1.6g||2.0g ||oc3.06
================================================== =====================
rotate 90---------------0.3----0.2----0.5----0.5----0.6----0.3----0.3
rotate 9----------------2.6----2.1----2.3----2.4----3.0----2.2----2.1
rotate .9---------------2.4----2.1----2.0----2.2----2.6----5.3----2.0
1 pixel gausian blur----1.0----0.9----0.6----0.7----0.8----3.2----0.6
3.7 gausian blur--------2.7----2.4----2.2----2.1----2.5----5.2----1.3
85 gausian blur---------3.3----2.9----3.1----3.3----3.5----5.1----1.6
50%/1/0 unsharp mask----1.1----1.0----0.9----1.1----1.3----4.1----0.6
50%/3.7/0 unsharp mask--2.9----2.4----2.5----2.6----2.9----4.6----1.3
50%/10/5 unsharp mask---2.9----2.5----2.9----3.1----3.6----6.3----1.3
Despeckle---------------2.2----1.8----0.7----0.7----0.8----4.4----1.3
rgb to cmyk mode change-8.2----7.0----2.6----3.0----4.3----6.4----5.3
60% Reduction-----------1.2----0.9----0.7----0.8----0.8----2.0----0.5
Lens Flare--------------0.6----2.9----4.7----5.1----6.1----6.7----1.4
Color Halftone----------5.0----4.3----4.8----5.4----4.2----6.1----2.2
NTSC Colors-------------2.9----2.3----5.3----6.1----4.2----7.6----2.9
Accent Edges-----------15.6---12.3---15.4---17.5---16.3---15.5---11.8
Pointilize-------------14.7---11.0---13.7---15.4---25.1---15.4----6.7
Watercolor-------------34.2---26.4---35.4---40.1---35.6---30.2---28.1
Polar Coordinates-------7.3----5.8----3.8----4.2----5.1----6.1----3.3
Radial Blur------------38.7---33.2---27.9---32.0---53.8---25.9---17.3
Lighting Effects--------2.2----1.8----2.7----3.0----3.5----6.1----1.3
================================================== ====================
TOTALS in seconds------ 155---126.2--148.4--151.3--180.6--168.7--93.2

Normalized scores.......
--------subset weighted 279----338----346----316----276----189----488

[Eug]

Fixed:

Code:
                   ||2xAth||2xAth||2x G4||2x G4||Single ||2x G5||2xXeon
                   ||1700+||2400+||1.42g||1.25g||G5 1.6g||2.0g ||oc3.06

rotate 90---------------0.3----0.2----0.5----0.5----0.6----0.3----0.3
rotate 9----------------2.6----2.1----2.3----2.4----3.0----2.2----2.1
rotate .9---------------2.4----2.1----2.0----2.2----2.6----5.3----2.0
1 pixel gausian blur----1.0----0.9----0.6----0.7----0.8----3.2----0.6
3.7 gausian blur--------2.7----2.4----2.2----2.1----2.5----5.2----1.3
85 gausian blur---------3.3----2.9----3.1----3.3----3.5----5.1----1.6
50%/1/0 unsharp mask----1.1----1.0----0.9----1.1----1.3----4.1----0.6
50%/3.7/0 unsharp mask--2.9----2.4----2.5----2.6----2.9----4.6----1.3
50%/10/5 unsharp mask---2.9----2.5----2.9----3.1----3.6----6.3----1.3
Despeckle---------------2.2----1.8----0.7----0.7----0.8----4.4----1.3
rgb to cmyk mode change-8.2----7.0----2.6----3.0----4.3----6.4----5.3
60% Reduction-----------1.2----0.9----0.7----0.8----0.8----2.0----0.5
Lens Flare--------------0.6----2.9----4.7----5.1----6.1----6.7----1.4
Color Halftone----------5.0----4.3----4.8----5.4----4.2----6.1----2.2
NTSC Colors-------------2.9----2.3----5.3----6.1----4.2----7.6----2.9
Accent Edges-----------15.6---12.3---15.4---17.5---16.3---15.5---11.8
Pointilize-------------14.7---11.0---13.7---15.4---25.1---15.4----6.7
Watercolor-------------34.2---26.4---35.4---40.1---35.6---30.2---28.1
Polar Coordinates-------7.3----5.8----3.8----4.2----5.1----6.1----3.3
Radial Blur------------38.7---33.2---27.9---32.0---53.8---25.9---17.3
Lighting Effects--------2.2----1.8----2.7----3.0----3.5----6.1----1.3

TOTALS in seconds       155---126.2--148.4--151.3--180.6--168.7--93.2

Normalized scores
(subset weighted)       279----338----346----316----276----189----488

So it's pretty clear that the non-G5-optimized code sucks, considering the single 1.6 with optimized code scores much higher (using the weighted normalized Ars scoring system). It's amazing what a little code tweaking can do.

By the way, your table includes 2xP4, which is of course, impossible. Maybe you mean 2xXeon?

EDIT:

Corrected 2xXeon part in tables. Missed the description in the first read thru.

By the way, I didn't really clean it up. It was properly formatted, but you just omitted the [code] function, which uses a font with fixed spacing.

[1_of_9]

That is what the x after p4 stands for...just was limited on characters. Plus I wrote "2.4ghz Xeons OC'd to
3.06ghz" - can't get much clearer than that. Thanks for cleaning the formatting up!

[Ysean]

Originally posted by skwerrl:
a machine with abetter GPU and twice the VRAM would definitely do better in photoshop benchmarks, and i was wondering what gfx cards were used in the testing of the 1.6s becasue the standard config is with an nvidia geforce fx 5200 ultra, while an ATI radeon 9800 with a better chip and 128MB of DDR VRAM would easily blow the nvidia away.

and these cards also enhance 2D performance along with 3D

I've *NEVER* heard of FPU functions ever being enhanced by a general purpose graphics card. Maybe this is heaven and everything influences performance? haha

[freeandunmuzzled]

I think the opteron fanboys on this thread should tell us what they do with their computers for a living...

[Gee4orce]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Ok everyone who uses their computers for real work. Raise your hands if you spend your day throwing complex filters at giant Photoshop documents all day?

Or do you measure performance by how fast and smoothly you get your work done with tons of necessary apps open at once and switching between them?

You're absolutely correct - and guess what, the G5 will absolutely scream when it comes to working in multiple apps. Why ? because it's all down to bandwidth, and the G5 is a bandwidth monster.

I think that single-app benchmark tests actually reflect poorly on the perceived speed of the G5, exactly because of this fact. The G5 will feel a lot faster to use than the raw numbers would have you think.

At the end of the day, the only real test is to have two competing machines side-by-side that you can compare directly doing the things you want to do.

[moki]

Two things of interest.

One is that it's quite likely that if you did nothing else, but ran this test on a future version of MacOS X (ie, not the 10.2.7 it comes bundled with), you'd end up with a better result. Yes, really. But I can neither confirm nor deny that.

Secondly, the Photoshop optimization plugin does indeed only optimize certain things. It certainly helps out, but a full G5 optimized Photoshop built with gcc 3.3 is a wonderful thing.

It's amazing how much of a difference mature compilers make. Just recompiling code with gcc 3.3 makes for a very noticeable difference in speed, even on G4s.

With IBM bringing xlc to MacOS X, things are going to get very interesting.

[Anand]

Finally the words of wisdom. Everybody is complaining about stuff that has already been mentioned! Just re-read that e-week article that states what everybody is noticing: "Apple's goal for Smeagol is to deliver Mac OS X performance at least "on par" with what Jaguar could achieve on Motorola G4 chips running at the same speed;"


Thank you Moki for stating this again - and welcome back. After WWWDC we had not heard much from you - even though you were the only one speaking the truth! You could (and should) have come back to gloat!

[BZ]

I hate it when Moki comes along and ruins all of our poor thoughts, bad speculation and off-the-cuff sarcasm with truth and perspective.

Annoying to say the least..

Back to the program...

IT IS WAY TOO SLOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!! I AM NEVER BUYING ANOTHER MAC. AMD RULES!



BZ

[fritzair]

Thanks for the testing Mac Fans.
Now I will go and buy a P4 3.o and make sure the HT is on.
Imagine what that machine could do if it had a fast HD or RAID?

[fritzair]

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
You're absolutely correct - and guess what, the G5 will absolutely scream when it comes to working in multiple apps. Why ? because it's all down to bandwidth, and the G5 is a bandwidth monster.

I think that single-app benchmark tests actually reflect poorly on the perceived speed of the G5, exactly because of this fact. The G5 will feel a lot faster to use than the raw numbers would have you think.

At the end of the day, the only real test is to have two competing machines side-by-side that you can compare directly doing the things you want to do.

I rarely use more then one app at a time. Do you mean listening to iTunes in the background while playing Scrabble?

[krassy]

Originally posted by kupan787:
I threw in the Opteropn numbers taken from http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...ron-1_15.html., and bolded fastest results.

Code:
                     Ath   Ath   P4     P4   Ath   2xAth  G5   2xOpt
Test                 3000  2700  3.06   2.8  2200  2200   1.6   244

1 Rotate 90           0.2   0.2   0.2   0.2   0.3   0.3   0.4   0.2
2 Rotate 9            2.8   2.9   2.7   3.3   3.5   2.4   2.7   2.4
3 Rotate .9           2.6   2.6   2.5   3.2   3.3   2.2   2.8   2.2
4 Gaussian Blur 1     0.8   0.8   0.8   0.9   1.1   1.0   0.6   0.7
5 Gaussian Blur 3.7   3.0   2.9   2.0   2.1   3.8   2.4   2.3   2.0
6 Gaussian Blur 85    3.4   3.5   2.3   2.6   4.6   2.9   3.5   2.3
7 Unsharp 50/1/0      1.0   1.1   0.9   1.2   1.3   1.0   1.1   0.8
8 Unsharp 50/3/7/0    3.1   3.1   2.1   2.4   4.0   2.5   2.8   2.2
9 Unsharp 50/10/5     3.1   3.1   2.2   2.4   4.0   2.5   3.4   2.2
10 Despeckle          2.6   2.7   2.2   4.0   3.3   1.9   0.8   2.9
11 RGB-CMYK           8.1   8.2   7.3   9.4  10.0   5.4   4.2   7.4
12 Reduce Size 60%    1.2   1.2   0.9   1.0   1.5   1.1   0.8   1.0
13 Lens Flare         3.9   4.0   2.5   3.8   4.3   3.1   6.0   4.2
14 Color Halftone     2.8   3.3   2.2   2.4   4.3   4.5   4.3   2.6
15 NTSC Colors        2.3   2.4   2.4   2.6   3.1   3.1   4.3   2.4
16 Accented Edges    10.4  10.9  10.9  12.0  13.7  13.9  16.2  12.1
17 Pointillize       17.5  17.7  12.1  18.8  21.3  12.0  25.0  20.1
18 Water Color       22.6  23.6  26.4  29.2  29.4  29.9  35.8  25.7
19 Polar Coordinates  8.0   8.3   7.0   8.5  10.2   6.1   4.9   8.0
20 Radial Blur       46.6  46.9  33.1  43.6  62.7  34.4  54.3  38.2
21 Lighting Effects   2.0   2.0   1.9   2.1   2.5   2.0   3.4   2.0

Total               148.0 151.4 124.6 155.7 192.2 134.6 179.6 141.6

i think the dual with its better memory architecture and higher system-bandwidth and with an own bus for each cpu will scale much better that a dual athlon or something... i think the dual 2GHz will at least get a total of 85 for this test.

[Spliffdaddy]

I'm a veteran peecee zealot, aka troll - and even I can't stomache some of the doomsday feelings around here.

Folks, I can tell you from experience and with complete honesty that every CPU and every platform it mates with will have differing performance characteristics. Some aspects will astound you and some will disappoint you. Exploiting the 'good parts' is always the primary goal. It takes time to maximize efficiency, especially if the platform is new or the technology is not in widespread use. Have patience. hell, you're mac zealots...you know more about patience than I ever will.

Sometimes the embarrassment of losing to lesser machines in a specific category of competition can be mitigated by outright domination in another category. A bit over a year ago I scrimped and saved and managed to assemble a decent dual 700MHz Xeon workstation. Bigass on-die cache, lots of RAM, and RAID 0 SCSI drives. It's hard to explain how bad it feels to get outscored by a $500 Athlon machine, when you're at the controls of something 'decent'. Revenge was sweet, though, when it came time to challenge one another in a distributing computing project. The planets would miraculously align, the angels would sing, and the Xeons would completely destroy that Athlon well past the point of humilation.


Keep the faith, homies. I haven't seen anything yet that leads me to believe the G5 isn't fast. Specs tell stories that most benchmarks leave out.

[scottiB]

Originally posted by fritzair:
I rarely use more then one app at a time. Do you mean listening to iTunes in the background while playing Scrabble?

That and creating DVD menu layers in Photoshop while Discreet Cleaner compresses in the background, smartass.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by moki:
It's amazing how much of a difference mature compilers make. Just recompiling code with gcc 3.3 makes for a very noticeable difference in speed, even on G4s.

With IBM bringing xlc to MacOS X, things are going to get very interesting.

I posted some numbers in this thread. This is probably an anomaly, but it is very interesting to note that NASA gets a 70% speedup in vector performance on the G5 using XLC instead of GCC 3.3 to compile the code. And on the G4, the speedup is 40%, which is pretty d@mn fine too.

[another_steve]

Originally posted by Eug:

So it's pretty clear that the non-G5-optimized code sucks, considering the single 1.6 with optimized code scores much higher (using the weighted normalized Ars scoring system). It's amazing what a little code tweaking can do.

Yes, as mentioned, it's important for people to actually look at the entire results and not just look at the total time in seconds. The notion of using weighted scores is very important. It's entirely possible (and prettly close to what's happening here) to have a processor dominate in 19 of the 21 tests, but due to the size of the two filters like "Radial Blur" and "Water Coler" the total time results get skewed.

The total time in seconds is an interesting benchmark, but due to the drastic difference in completion times of tests, it's less meaningful than a weighted (normalized) score.

Steve

[WRiX]

What I have not seen addressed yet is how much Panther (OS 10.3) is supposed to speed tasks up. To be fair, we need to wait both for the dual G5's AND OS 10.3 running PS7 with the G5 optimization.

It's my opinion that the playing field has been leveled with the first gen G5's (making up for Motorola's incompetence for the past several years) and the POTENTIAL of the Mac platform is vastly greater than that of the competition.

[Brazuca]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I posted some numbers in this thread. This is probably an anomaly, but it is very interesting to note that NASA gets a 70% speedup in vector performance on the G5 using XLC instead of GCC 3.3 to compile the code. And on the G4, the speedup is 40%, which is pretty d@mn fine too.

Actually, this is the result:

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
These are initial benchmarks showing the improvements in performance with NASA's code, provided by IBM's XL compilers over Absoft Fortran (scalar) and GCC 3.3 (vector):

Code:
Type of Code   G4     G5
Scalar       +70%  +210%	
Vector       +40%   +70%

Yowza!

[Catfish_Man]

Now I wonder how much of OSX and/or Photoshop is going to be recompiled with XLC in future versions

Photoshop's in C++ isn't it?

I also wonder if Apple can make an Objective-C front end to IBM's optimizer and recompile ALL of OSX with it. Probably not, but it would be nice

[moki]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
I also wonder if Apple can make an Objective-C front end to IBM's optimizer and recompile ALL of OSX with it. Probably not, but it would be nice

Well, even just using gcc 3.3 instead of 3.1, with bottleneck routines optimized specifically for the G5 is going to make a big difference. And then there is algorithm optimization...

Benchmarks generally test very specific sets of code, repeated thousands or even millions of times over. As such, they are very sensitive to how optimized the specific algorithm is: any deficiency gets magnified immensely.

As others have stated, benchmarks generally test how efficient a compiler is almost as much as how efficient a computer system is.

That said, the real world tests such as these photoshop tests are what matters. But again, if some of the filters/operations used aren't G5 optimized, the effect will be exaggerated.

You needn't worry. There will always be faster machines out there, but the G5 is the real deal folks. It's an amazing processor and architecture.

[juanpacolopez]

Originally posted by moki:
You needn't worry. There will always be faster machines out there, but the G5 is the real deal folks. It's an amazing processor and architecture.

Amen.

I think alot of the attitude here comes from the attitudes of many PC users and their approach to not buying Apple gear.

The argument almost ALWAYS follows (at least in my circle of friends) that Macs are too slow, and therefore not worth buying. Mind you, these are people fresh out of college with nice jobs and no families, who don't mind dropping $500 on the newest video card just to get another 20fps out of Quake3.

But inevitably the conversation turns to benchmarks. If the G5 does poorly in benchmarks (even only some) it's going to be that much harder for PC zealots to believe that the G5 is, as you stated, the "real deal".

The fact is, the architecture backing these things up is astounding. The sheer amount of bandwidth on the main bus alone is enough to make a P4 look fairly pathetic. As you VERY correctly pointed out, there will always be something faster out there. The G5 just has the potential (and the system architecture) to do really amazing things.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by moki:
Well, even just using gcc 3.3 instead of 3.1, with bottleneck routines optimized specifically for the G5 is going to make a big difference. And then there is algorithm optimization...

So you compile with GCC 3.3 instead of CodeWarrior? If that's the case, then you might be able to use XLC, correct? Would a speed boost be of use for your games or utilities?

[Sheep]

Won't the G5 smoke any PC out there once they release a 64-bit version of Photoshop?
Anything 64-bit for that matter

[osiris]

oops