Macs:

G4 Dual 475 MHZ 750MB RAM
G5 Dual 1800 Mhz 2500MB Ram

PC:

AMD 2400 512MB RAM
Pentium4 2.4Ghz 1GB RAM

I recently performed Jim Burton's benchmark extensively on the two top systems mac/pc (See attached link)

At first the G5 was abysmal, really bad. But there is a quirk: you can and should kick up the bucket on the Mac. I went to 300, then to 512. This had a noticible effect, and the G5 caught up to the times on my P4. So Id call them 'even' under those circumstances. [BTW, kicking up the bucket on PC has a small effect, but not like that on the G5]. Now, I have NOT tried Poser5 on my Dual G4, which is closer in line in price to the P4 I have. You never know, I might get good times on the G4. At any rate, getting this even-steven time on the G5 has given me the belief that I can set up a 4-node Poser5 RenderCondo on the computers I already possess, and all the nodes will do just fine in render time.

Now for my 2 cents thrown in:
One would not likely deliberately go out and purchase a G5 for rendering Poser, or working with Poser, unless you are Mac-dedicated for other reasons (not that there is anything wrong with that!)

Reason:

1. You are talking at least $1200 premium, perhaps $1600.

2. the Poser5 OSX product is NOT optimized for this great G5 computer. And I am not talking about the 'dual processor issue.' Forget dual....just the 1.8GhzG5 period. Even though I got my time up to P4 performance on a render, actually WORKING with Poser on this G5 is SLOW. You move the camera, ball spins for a second or two. You change actors, yikes, it takes at least 2-5 seconds for everything to settle down and the parameter dials to change. In general, you cannot grab/spin a dial, grab/spin another, grab/spin another. You have to click on a dial, wait half a second, then grab it/spin it. I cannot work like that. On my modest P4, you grab a dial and immediately spin, you change actors, you grab/spin a dial, you grab/spin a dial, you grab/spin a dial, continuous flow. Changing from the head to the body or body to head on my extremely morph-heavy EJ rig on my PC takes about 3/4 second TOTAL, everything settled in.

And launching/saving on the G5??? GO TO LUNCH.

I love this Mac. I am a composer, and it is the centerpiece of my DAW running the great LogicPro software. My buddy runs both Logic AND FinalCutPro on his with tremendous success. What a fantastic workstation.

But until Curious Labs treats Poser5 right on the Mac....

::::: Opera :::::