OT: Mac Pro and A.E. -Repost

as requested



So, we just got 29 mac pro's at the digital lab at my school, and i decided to do a little test. Here are the contenders:

1 12" Power Book G4
Processors 1.5ghz PowerPC G4
Memory 1.25GB DDR SDRAM
Mac OS X 10.4.6
Graphics Card-GeForce FX Go5200 w/ 64mb of Vram

2 Power Mac G5
Processor Dual 2 GHz Power PC G5
Memory 1GB DDR SDRAM
Mac OS X 10.4.7
ATI Radeon 9600 XT w/ 128mb of VRAM

3 Mac Pro
Processor 2 x 2 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon
Memory 1 gb 667 MHZ DDR2 FB DImm
Mac OS X 10.4.7
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT w/ 256 MB of VRam

All are running After Effects 7.0 (the Mac Pro Running under Rosetta) I chose an AEP from anvils Free Anvil set (specifically the butterfly Render under customshapes) All are on standard settings. But the render settings were set to RGB + Alpha with Caps Lock DOWN to stop the frame from cycling speeding up renders. The whole thing was 5 seconds Flat

The times ended up like this:

In First Place with a time of 3 min. 46 seconds was the Power Mac G5
In Second Place with a time of 7 min 11 Seconds is the Power mac g4 (my Little laptop)
And in a slow third is the Mac Pro running rosetta at 8 Min and 3 Seconds


Any Further Details can be inquired upon, Keep in mind these mac Pro's as based out, i.e they are as low as you can go in the intel tower chain
Further tests coming in several other programs

-Aaron Zander

P.S. this is not saying the mac pro is slow, this is simply a test to show the effects of rosseta on A.E. things will change after the universal version of after effects.

Aaron many thanks for -reposting this

no problem, I was working in fcp thursday night as well, in a dv50 ntsc format, and rendered out a 3 min quicktime, all i have to say is when it's created in under 45 seconds...I'm very very impressed

Thanks Aaron if you could post any other future test results/comparisons on this article it would be appreciated.

Cheers man

Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Couple of things - im very interested about running AE 7 on it so any working indicators you could give for renders and general work would would be great, but also before i forget would also be interesting to know how the Firewire on the ProMacs is shaping up?

I'm also very interested about the firewire on the se new machines since I've heard that Intel only patched firewire onto the southbridge of the motherboards and that all ports are effectively sharing a single standard 33 MHz PCI lane... ?

hmm, well I wish i could give you some sort of test, but A we have one computer that has refused to read 1 fw maxtor drive, but reads others fine, and the rest seem to be shaping up, If you guys know of any way to test the fw speeds let me know either here or by email

ok so I ran my telecine footage from a dvcpro50 tape through cinema tools its 152 clips totaling like 46 min or so 20.75 gigs

it only took 27 min to run through it all

IMHO, if you want serious professional benchmark test results, go to [www.barefeats.com]. Aaron's school machines do not have enough RAM in them to run effective tests. Barefeats get loaded machines to test. You can write Barefeats with test suggestions @ Rob-ART Morgan <rob-art@barefeats.com>. Rob's a great guy

- Joey

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Ya Joe is totaly right, my laptop has more ram. It's unfortunate but we had to buy base base models to beable to afford them. And god knows they are still fast