|
Speed Impressions
So, our machine was finally configured as a
four-core 2.0 GHz Xeon with a 160GB boot drive, two 320GB
general-purpose drives, a single SuperDrive and 4GB RAM (2GB
from Apple, 2GB from third party). The graphics card was
left as the base GeForce
7300GT/256MB. Booting up produced
the
first surprise: speed. The boot sequence fairly flew by,
dumping us at our desktop almost before we had had time to
realize what was going on. This augured well. We'd
used Apple's excellent Migration Assistant to copy over all
our documents and settings from our previous dual-2GHz Power
Mac G5, so we essentially had a pair of cloned machines sitting
in front of us.
The first program up to the plate was Cheetah3D,
an excellent, low cost 3D app, much valued by architectural
visualizers for its excellent rendering
engine. It is also a Universal
Binary and fully multiprocessor
aware. We loaded a variety of familiar scenes and set to
rendering them on each machine. Bearing in mind that this
is the ‘Low-End' Mac Pro, the results were little
short of incredible. In many situations, the Mac Pro would
be half-way through final rendering while the Power Mac was
still doing Radiosity calculations. The sight of a render
being split into four simultaneous chunks was also pretty
satisfying. Using Cheetah's render timer we could see
that the Mac Pro was achieving times easily four times as
fast as the Power Mac.
So, generally the
Mac Pro is around 4-5 times faster on complex rendering,
although the test with Depth of Field turned on (Scene 3
graph above) showed a massive 6.4 times speed increase.
Truly
impressive -- and
this is for the 'slowest' Mac Pro.
OpenGL Performance
We mentioned that our choice of graphics card
was forced upon us by the unavailability of the ATi X1900
at the time of ordering. We were hoping that we could 'make
do' with this fairly middling card until the more powerful
card came along. However, we were pleasantly surprised by
its performance. Using fully-textured OpenGL previews of
complex models in Intel-native programs like Cheetah3D and
modo 202, we were surprised at the responsiveness of this
little card. Really, it handled everything we threw at it
with aplomb (admittedly, there were no urban planning master
schemes in there). Still, to try and quantify our experience
we ran Maxon's CineBench 9.5 3D benchmarking application
on both machines. Here are the results (higher numbers are
better):
So what we have is a near 20% OpenGL speed-up
for the Mac Pro. Odd, given that the 6800GT was the top-of-the-line
offering
a year ago (with a price tag $100 more than today's X1900).
This could be explained by the fact that these cards are
designed for games -- low-poly models with high fill
rates. The needs of 3D visualisation are somewhat different:
specifically, the manipulation of high poly count models
is something that can actually be helped more by raw processor
speed than simply having a monster OpenGL card (although
we'd expect the Quadro
4500 to take things into a completely
different league).
To further stress the card, we needed to test
it with SketchUp -- the real OpenGL hog. However, since
SketchUp isn't native on Intel Macs yet (why ever not?),
the fact that it only runs under Rosetta emulation meant
that we were going to be faced with a problem. However, it
was a problem that presented us with an opportunity to stress
our machine in another way...
Next: Boot
Camp, Parallels, Windows XP and AutoCAD
next
page > | 1 | 2 |3 |
|
