Comparing Macs for speed

Hi, just wondering if anyone runs SL on a g5 Tower. I own a Powerbook 1.5ghz/1.25Gigs Ram. I am thinking of moving to a G5 tower with 2-4 gigs ram and 2ghz+. Will i see a remarkable improvement? Right now i experience lag especially when turning around. I know there will always be lag, but i would like to see some considerable difference to make the upgrade and spend 2k+

I cant much technical things but I have seen the diff betwenn a PB and a Tower.. go for it.. it helps.. ad s lot of memory to... But dont forget the speed of the connection to the Internet..


Good Luck!

Well I can't compare for SL, but barefeets has a nice comparrison for DOOM3 so that might give you an idea. This is taken on the Universal Binary one so the performance on he CoreDuo iMacs really shows.

here is what they used for thier tests:
Mac G5/2.0 = May 2005 iMac G5/2.0GHz 'ALS' 20" with Radeon 9600
iMac G5/2.1 = Oct 2005 iMac G5/2.1GHz 'iSight' 20" with Radeon X600XT
iMac CD/1.83= Jan 2006 iMac 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo 17" with Radeon X1600
iMac CD/2.0 = Jan 2006 iMac 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo 20" with Radeon X1600
SC G5/2.0 PM= Oct 2004 Single-Core Dual G5/2.0GHz with Radeon 9600 XT
DC G5/2.0 PM = Oct 2005 Dual-Core G5/2.0GHz with GeForce 6600LE
SC G5/2.0 PM* = Oct 2004 Single-Core Dual G5/2.0GHz with Radeon X800 XT



My PowerBook G4 1.67GHz get about 16FPS in DOOM3 so you can see there is a Marked improvement to a PowerMac. When youg et your make sure to get the Geforce 7800GT you will not regret haveing that card.

Hope that is all of some help to you.

I've asked a few times for a benchmark for SL in both Mac and Windows with no luck at all.

I was talking ingame to a graphics card expert (at least she seemed to know what she was talking about) who said that SL and Doom worked in very different ways. She was a Windows only person who said that Doom worked faster with an Intel/nVidia combination while SL would work better with AMD/ATI.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Or even better...can anyone at LL or anywhere else recommend a benchmark that is likely to be a predictor of SL performance??

Can't comment on Doom, but it's a well known fact SL runs better with nVidia cards due to openGL support so your friend is quite wrong about that.

Personal experience is that AMD does works better for SL though, preferably with an nVidia chipset motherboard.

(obligatory mac content, my 12" PB G4 runs SL surprisingly well, but is blown away by my PC. Can't wait to hear how the Intel Macs fair.)

Here's a simple test I did a few weeks ago, comparing a Quad-processor G5 to a Single-processor Pentium (Running XP):

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Sorry to bump this, but last summer I went from a G4 DP with similar specs to your PB, to a 2.7 GHz DP G5 with tonnes of RAM and a much bigger graphics card too.

My internet connection speed didn't change.

My fps in some well known (to me) locations went from typically 3-5 to (with the same settings) typically 35-40. I now run with just about every option on and a 192m draw distance (except local lighting since 1.7 sadly which still kills my fps), at typcially 18-20 fps in most sims, and over 10 in the WA.

If you're on a good broadband connection it doesn't seem to make much difference actually. I recently went from 3Mbps to 10 (my ISP upgraded me for free, thank you!) and my FPS didn't change at all. It does, however, mean I can now run multiple clients with good numbers, download files in the background etc.

About multi-threading SL - I'd sort of like to see it, but I'm not 100% sure. A single instance of the client basically chews 100% of one processor. If it's multithreaded would it chew 100% of both? - it's a bit of a resource hog after all. Having one free processor means I can run Adium, PS, mail, safari etc. without impacting my SL performance, which is also kind of important.

Yes and No. They are both OpenGL, both want a lot of system resources. But SL will demand more from your CPU then Doom3. Doom3 offloads almost everything it can to the GPU while SL has the CPU do most things.

But if you are comaprring Windows/Mac windows will be faster given the same hardware. The maufacturers like ATI and nVidia spend much more time optimizing thier drivers under Windows then Mac OS. They will get more speed out of them. So if you are looking for the fastest SL Machine I wold say go with an AMD Athlon64 X2 of some variatey, and a Geforce 7800 of some sort with a good ammount of RAM. But if that is not what ou want and want a moc for its advantages over windows and ase of use then don't stress a mac/win comaprrison and get a PowerMac G5 with a 7800 you will have a good SL experiance.

cool.. thanks for all the replies. Its seems like a bad time to get a mac because of the intel switch. but i just cant'. I run cpu hogging sound software which hasn't been released for mac intel yet. I think i will go ahead and get tower with everything that i can afford.

thx!

No prob

I you will enjoy it just get the good Video Card

While I was in the Apple Store the other day, after having just gotten hooked to SL, shopping for a new iBook, I tried SL on the Quad Core Power PC and the 30" Cinema Display...../me dies of longing

(Yes, they did let me try SL on several systems -- I brought along the latest version on a stealth USB key in my cell phone. It ran pretty well straight off the key, but I was also able to copy it to the desktop & run it. I did not like the default, however, of always trying to save my password!)