Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 16, 2006 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Rosetta Performance (or lack thereof)
With no Universal Binary versions of Adobe or Microsoft applications, you're bound to run into something that isn't native on the Mac Pro. Of course if there's performance to be lost, we're there to benchmark it.
First off, let's look at our Word HTML conversion test. Note that this test used to crash on earlier builds of OS X, but Apple has thankfully fixed the problem so it now completes. The only other problem is that it takes a long time to complete:
The fastest Mac Pro configuration we tested took about three times as long to complete this test as the PowerMac G5, and that's about how things feel when you're running a Rosetta application. The application is always bearable, but it feels like everything takes 2 - 3x as long as it would if it were native.
Next up we ran PSBench under Photoshop CS2 and came away with some more interesting results:
| Apple Mac Pro 2.66GHz (Quad) | Apple Mac Pro 2.66GHz (Dual) | Apple PowerMac G5 2.5GHz (Dual) | |
| Rotate Clockwise - 90 degrees |
0.6
|
0.5
|
0.5
|
| Rotate Clockwise - 9 degrees |
2.2
|
3
|
1.2
|
| Rotate Clockwise - 0.9 degrees |
4
|
4.1
|
3.6
|
| 1 pixel Gaussian Blur |
2.2
|
2.3
|
2.1
|
| 3.7 pixel Gaussian Blur |
2.5
|
3.4
|
2.8
|
| 85 pixel Gaussian Blur |
3
|
4.2
|
3.1
|
| 50%, 1 pixel, 0 level unsharp mask |
2.3
|
3
|
2.2
|
| 50%, 3.7 pixel, 0 lever unsharp mask |
3.4
|
4.3
|
3.6
|
| 50%, 10 pixel, 5 level unsharp mask |
3.2
|
4.6
|
4
|
| Despeckle filter |
2.2
|
2.4
|
2.5
|
| RGB to CMYK |
3.8
|
5.2
|
3.4
|
| 60% Reduction |
1.4
|
1.6
|
1.4
|
| Lens Flare |
5.3
|
5.3
|
4.9
|
| Color Halftone Filter |
21.5
|
23.1
|
9.2
|
| NTSC Colors Filter |
5.9
|
5.9
|
4.1
|
| Accented Edges Brush Strokes |
13.3
|
13.7
|
10.7
|
| Pointillize Filter |
31
|
36.9
|
15.8
|
| Watercolor Filter |
28.8
|
31.2
|
20.8
|
| Polar Coordinates |
2.1
|
2.9
|
1.6
|
| Radial Blur Filter |
7.3
|
11.3
|
17.1
|
| Lighting Effects Filter |
3.5
|
4
|
2.9
|
| Total |
149.5
|
172.9
|
117.5
|
The PowerMac G5 is still faster, overall it completed all of the tasks about 32% faster than the dual core Mac Pro 2.66GHz but comparing it to the shipping quad core configuration closed that gap even more. There were even some tests that the non-native Mac Pro could complete quicker than the PowerMac G5, which bodes well for how fast the Mac Pro will be when Photoshop CS3 eventually comes out.
Overall, Rosetta has gotten better in terms of stability, but performance is still no where near native G5 performance on average (nor did anyone expect it to be). You can get by using Rosetta, but it will irritate you especially if you're using any Universal Binary applications on a regular basis as the difference in performance is fairly apparent.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Could you show me how to get Dell to take $149 off for the monitor? Whenever I try to configure it if I select the "No Monitor" option it lists a cost of $0, meaning I don't gain or lose anything.The Dell protection plan is truly enterprise class however the point of the comparison was to look at things from a purely hardware/cost of components perspective, which is how these Mac vs. PC price comparisons are usually done. Once you go above and beyond that then you get into this slippery slope argument of how much you should tack on for the price of being able to run OS X, etc...
Take care,
Anand
delta53 - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
The "they" was referring to Apple namely at the WWDC6, no offence Anand. The option is given under the Medium and Large business section, but your point is well taken that exact price is impossible in that section.Keep up the good reports,
Kyle
Furen - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I was under the impression that Cinebench had very light memory usage. It looks to me that what will make or break Woodcrest's "power efficiency" is going to be FBDIMM power so perhaps loading up the ram will paint slightly different numbers...TamarinMonkey - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Now that we can run both OSX and XP on the same hardware, I'd be interested to see some of the benchmarks run on both OSs and see how they do. Any plans to do this in a future article?~Tam~
retrospooty - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I am pretty sure this has been done, and OSX has been found to be lacking, especially in 3d games. The speed advantage of PC over MAC was not that Intel/AMD were so much faster than IBM G4, then G5, but the OS and drivers are much finer tuned.Tegeril - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
It was definitely not so much about the OS/Drivers being finer tuned in regards to 3D gaming. It was definitely a DirectX versus OpenGL issue.psychobriggsy - Thursday, August 17, 2006 - link
More specifically, Apple's OpenGL implementation on PowerPC was/is severely lacking.I wonder if the Intel Mac OS X drivers are better - i.e., the ATI/Nvidia drivers ported to Mac OS X.
Konq - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I just played WoW last night on my Quadro 4500-equiped Mac Pro. An ATI version should be similar. I was in a 40 man raid for my guild. This thing screams in OS X. I get 30-40 fps in a crowded IF, 50-100 fps flying, and I peaked at 135 fps looking at the sky. All at 1920x1200. The drivers sure have improved and I think are better on intel. I have a 2.3 Ghz dual core G5 and this is twice as fast even thought the G5 had a 7800 GT card. Oh - and I never noticed the fans spin up during the raid even though I had low sound volume.Rumor has it that OpenGL will be much improved when it goes multithreaded in 10.4.8. We will see. :)
Konq - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I forgot to mention: the Mac Pro loaded the WoW AQ40 instance in about 2 seconds! Faster even the second time. I can't express how impressed I am with this machine.As a side note, I used Office in Rosetta, and it is as fast as my G5. Maybe 4GB of RAM helps here but I was worried after reading Anands' report.
Pirks - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Please use XP x64 benchmarks as well, since it's uberinteresting to see how both 64-bit OSes from MS and Apple compete. XP 32-bit is okay, but a bit boring.