Paris Calling: Testing the Power Mac G4/450 - By Andreas Pfeiffer (online at http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/11/28/parismon.html)
Paris -- Since Apple iCEO Steve Jobs' impressive introduction of the Power Mac G4 at August's Seybold Seminars in San Francisco, the new top-of-the-line model has had mixed fortunes (quite well-covered on this site).
Noticeably absent, however, have been real-world benchmark figures for the high-end model, which is based on a new motherboard design. How does the 450-MHz G4 really stack up against other models? Does AltiVec (a k a Velocity Engine) really provide as much acceleration as promised? How will other applications benefit from the new architecture?
Of course we were curious, and when Apple commissioned Pfeiffer Consulting to produce an independent benchmark report comparing the G4/450 with other models, we jumped at the opportunity.
Results Apple set out to turn the Power Mac G4 into the dream machine for Adobe Photoshop professionals. All G4s ship with a Velocity Engine plug-in that enables the Velocity Engine vector-processing unit for many of Photoshop's filters. The results are impressive, especially for filters hand-tuned for optimal performance: For example, lighting effects are four times faster on a G4/450 than on the standard G3/400. But most other operations are also accelerated significantly by the Velocity Engine: Resampling is more than three times faster and image rotation is about twice as fast. The speed gains are mostly due to the Velocity Engine; results are clearly less impressive with the optimization plug-in disabled.
UltraDMA vs. SCSI Unlike the blue-and-white G3s, the top-of-the line G4s do not come with Ultra2 LVD SCSI as standard equipment, though it remains available as a built-to-order option. For internal drives, this seems to have been a wise decision: The G4 beats the top-of-the-line G3 by almost a factor of two in Finder-based copy operations. The faster drive also clearly impacts many other tests.
Design and publishing As can be expected, the G4's advantage is somewhat less for standard design and publishing applications that don't use the Velocity Engine -- speed gains in QuarkXPress are noticeable but not groundbreaking. Adobe InDesign fares better: Running Adobe's new page-layout program, a G4/450 outpaces a G3/450 by a factor of two for some operations, which could be due, at least in part, to the increased memory bandwidth of the new motherboard design.
Verdict? While in day-to-day operations, the G4 may not hit the supercomputer performance Jobs touted at Seybold, it's definitely a worthwhile machine. The Photoshop benchmarks show the potential of the Velocity Engine clearly, even for tasks that don't specifically call floating-point operations. But even for non-optimized programs, the G4 delivers appreciable performance improvements.
The biggest regret: It's a shame that 3D developers have so far been slow to adopt the Velocity Engine. So far, none of the major Mac modeling and rendering applications has offered optimized versions.
MacWEEK.com Contributing Editor Andreas Pfeiffer is an industry analyst and editor in chief of the Pfeiffer Report.
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