PowerPC 970 perfs

[Melaure]

Hi,

the PPC970 seems to be the center of many debates on the net, and I think that many more facts will come soon. The Apple benchmarks make everybody sceptic, but the ones from PC sites too. The PPC970 is surely good to have so many reactions for or against it.

Happily, some users start to test real apps on these computers.

This time it's not Apple benchmark, but an After Effect ( http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/main.html ) user who had the chance to test the new PowerMac G5. This test was post on www.xlr8yourmac.com.

" Hi Mike, I belong to the After Effect-List, which exchanges information, tips, and techniques for both the PC and Mac versions of Adobe After Effects.   One of the listees was at WWDC, and ran a specific AE project that we all use to evaluate processor speed and performance.
Here is a copy and paste from his post this morning (Thursday):

==============================================
"Hey everyone,  I've been at Apple's developer conference and had a chance to install and  try out After Effects on a new G5.
I ran the Night Flight file that has come to be the standard for AE  benchmarking.  Since I didn't want to sit there and watch it render for  hours, I ran just the first 10 interlaced frames from the project's  pre-set render queue...
http://www.aefreemart.com/tutorials/3DinAE/nightflight/nightflight.html
Here are my results for this test on the three computers I have available  to me:

1 x 1.0 GHz G4 PowerBook 17" - ~30 minutes (3 min/frame)
2 x 2.66 GHz Pentium Xeon from Boxx - 11 min, 39 sec (1.2 min/frame)
2 x 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 - 6 min, 1 sec (0.6 min/frame)

I ran the Xeon test on a couple different identical machines to make sure  mine wasn't just running slowly, but got identical results.
Of course my Mac bias is well-documented, but I'm sure many people here can vouch for me as an honest person.  If the results had gone the other  way, I'd just keep my mouth shut and let someone else break the bad news.
Other observations about this test that may ultimately work in the Mac's  favor:

1) The machine was not running 64-bit Panther, but only a tweaked version  of 32-bit Jaguar.  Likewise, AE is obviously not yet compiled to take advantage of the G5 chip in any way.  Both or these situations will  automatically be rectified in the future.

2) Night Flight is very CPU-intensive, but not very disk I/O intensive.  I think the 1 GHz system bus and other details on the G5 will provide  greater gains for typical projects that rely more heavily on I/O."
==============================================

All pretty interesting!!!!
DAVID S.
pixelcraft studios  "


All the Apple Benchmarks were made without optimisation of the OS or Applications.  And when the Altivec is used it kicks the ass of SSE2 !.

The Amiga world should be happy of this cause the future of Amiga is PowerPC not crapy Intel design ...

[jd997uk]

If this is genuine, then it's a fairly good 'real' world example of what the PPC970 (aka G5) is capable of. It will be really interesting when these machines hit retail stores in August/September as Adobe will have got the 64bit versions of their products available.  I would expect a more-than detectable increase in performance.
The PPC route suddenly looks far more promising for those who know that you really do need a 3GHz processor to surf the web and send e-mails.  :-D
Seriously, it would be brilliant when OS4 is released for applications to be ported across to full PPC.  The usual names apply here: Imagine, ImageFX, etc. Audio Evolution is getting there, but a whole host more will be required before there can be justification to even consider the 970 as a future processor.

-john

[jeffimix]

Adobe products are probably the best indicator of PPC's true potential, it's products are soem of the most optimized for the Mac's dual processor setups.