Architosh Staff ([email protected])

27 April 2003

 

Feedback: Mac 3D and Big Poly Count - Advantage Mac?

Architosh recently published a reader's commentary about his 3D testing, comparing rendering performance using an AMD dual 2GHz machine (presumably Athlon) against a Power Mac Dual 1.25Ghz machine. The Power Mac had 1.5GBs of ram and the dual AMD machine had 2GB of ECC ram. According to John Pott, his rendering results were significantly faster on the dual Power Mac using LightWave 3D 7.5. You can read the article to get the full story here.

The Big Polygon Count Issue

Essentially the issue came up that perhaps where the PC was really falling down was when the polygon count got very large. Temujin Kuechle, another reader, wrote in with this feedback on the situation:

"I think that the issue of big polycount files being worked on more efficiently on Macs than PCs has held true for many years now. This was true in 1995 as well. I was doing large renderings for school projects , at the time 10,000 polys was typical."

Temujin added that back in 1995 he was working on SGI Indy boxes in addition to Macs and that there were clear differences between those machines. PC's weren't even considered back then, as Temujin says:

"...at the time as they were slow and buggy. Also the 3d software was for engineering only, not for illustrative purposes back then. Times have changed a bit."

Back in school in the mid 90's Temujin said:

"The SGIs at the time seemed to 3D render slowly but provided better quality renderings than what I could [get] on my Mac. But I was using a $200 program on a 120 Mhz Mac clone at the time, where as the SGI Indy boxes at university [used] Alias Studio tools and didn't have enough RAM to render quickly. The Indy boxes could surface models very quickly and with great results, where the cheapo program I used was a simple poly modeler and was a headache to deal with as it crashed often."

Temujin thinks the Mac OS X's OpenGL implementation hasn't been optimized yet, or at least as much as it could be.

"One thing I do notice in regards to performance observations, the 800 MHz Dell is very quick navigating small 3D scenes, but it gets choppy as the files size gets bigger. My DP G4 450 is quick enough with the small stuff, but then gets choppy and stays choppy (no faster / slower) as the file size gets bigger and bigger. Though, at a certain point, it starts to slow quite a bit."

More Reader Comments

John Pott is planning on doing more extensive tests and getting back to us. He believes -- like we do as well -- that the Mac is misunderstood in terms of true performance and that despite the GHz Gap the current G4 processor is quite capable and has some unique computation advantages that can be taken advantage of. We'll await his new test results....

Thanks for writing in Temujin!

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