Anthony Frausto (afrausto@architosh.com)

7 Nov 2003

 

Editorial: Reflections on the G5 Power Macs in CAD/3D

Apple's newest Power Mac G5 towers are extraordinary in their engineering and performance. The company has clearly raised the bar even for themselves. We've had the highend 2Ghz dual processor Power Mac G5 for about one week now and added it to a 20 inch Apple Cinema Display. The entire setup makes for one awesome CAD or 3D workstation. It is the envy of the entire studio.

Reflections on the G5

Despite many of the things you may have read regarding the performance of the G5 relative to either dual processor Xeons or the Pentium 4 let me state this: the G5 is considerably faster both on a raw performance level and as an entire system for CAD and 3D professionals, especially architects. Let me explain why.

Firstly, as you can see from Adobe Photoshop tests when an application has been optimized for the G5 it runs faster. It should be said that the vast majority of Mac applications out there are developed using Metrowerks' CodeWarrior IDE which doesn't have a fully optimized compiler for the new G5. According to developers we have spoken to Apple and IBM's GCC compiler is further along in G5 optimization. However, that compiler is geared towards Mach-O development which is a place developers who are supporting just Mac OS X can go. For everyone else who develops for both OS 9 and OS X, they are using different tools. The bottom line is that the vast majority of apps being used in cross-platform tests were developed and compiled with immature tools relative to the G5. This puts the G5 at a disadvantage compared to Intel and AMD.

If the G5 is beating everything Intel and AMD has to offer at Photoshop today, just think of what is possible when the vast majority of Mac compiler tools are fully matured to the G5.

The bottom line is that the G5 is superior in performance as a raw chip and architecture. The software side has yet to fully catch up and it will take many months. Once it does the performance benefit of the G5 will become even more apparent.

Reflections on Tasks Performance

Additionally, the new Power Mac G5's have performed a number of architecture oriented tasks very quickly in some informal tests we have begun to do. Architosh will be publishing a full battery of formalized tests specific to the architectural industry at a later date. What we have seen thus far is that Apple's Power Mac G5 dual processor model simply can't be beat in rendering by any Pentium 4 or Xeon machine. We have also learned that 2D redraw functionality in VectorWorks is faster on the G5 than on comparable Intel hardware. And lastly, we have seen in informal tests that PDF document viewing is up to six times faster than on comparable Intel hardware, depending on the nature of the PDF document. We ran tests using a Truss Joist Corporation product brochure, something many architects would download and use.

One caveat on the PDF scroll/render test. As Macworld magazine has pointed out, simple scroll tests cannot be used as a fair basis of comparison for processor performance because each operating system limits the speed at which the scroll function works for readability sake. Our opinion on this is while this is true we are interested in learning about what "platform" is more ideal for architects on the basis of real-world performance. If Microsoft limits their scroll more than Apple than they just slowed down architects on their platform. However, regardless of the scrolling limits, it is abundantly apparent that the G5 renders PDF pages far faster than Intel using either Apple's native PDF viewer application or Acrobat.

As mentioned above we will be publishing a formalized suite of tests in the near future. At the moment though it seems from our view that the G5 machine is the machine to beat for CAD professionals in the AEC industry.

For any questions or comments please email me at: afrausto@architosh.com

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