Woohoo! I just unboxed my shiny new 17" iMac Core Duo, 512MB RAM. The first app I installed was Carrara 5.02 Std. I did a couple quick renders and here's my initial impression: it's faster than my old machine! Now, my old machine is a B&W G3/350 with a processor upgrade to a G4/800 so it better be faster than that old beast. B^) C5 is dual processor aware, so you get 2 rendering squares going. Very nice. A few timings. These are from the scenes in the browser. I just opened the document switched to the render room and rendered. No settings were changed. Water & Caustics: 1:00 Palm Trees: 2:20 Lava: 2:36 That's all for now. I'm off to load this critter up with stuff. - Jasen.

Those arent too bad considering the translation overhead and Carrara being a complex app. As a test I did a Lava render on my Dual G5 1.8, 1GB RAM and lava took 59 sec. So if Carrara was native intel, I think the new iMac would beat it. Regards, Paul

poser - what about poser?

Sorry, I don't have Poser. - Jasen.

Thanks for the report Jasen... that puts me one step closer to getting my new machine this year. ;-)

Chuck

Jasen, Another thanks for the report. Nice to see the Rosetta takes advantage of the second CPU, I was wondering. I get 2:26 for Lava on my dual 800 G4 so that gives me reasonable rule of thumb for Rosetta performance. Regards, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Carrara Plug-ins

I would be surprise if Poser even runs on it. e-Frontiers are not the Mac experts and their MAC coding is not the best. The so call Poser SDK mac version is full of errors.

well my poser 6 runs okay on my G5. So I was hoping. Maybe just by luck it would work. I'm so waiting for someone with one of th enew macs to tell me. Love esther

well everything "should" run.. just under Rosetta... but who knows till ya try

It's been my intention for the last few years that once I get my degree, on my next big computer upgrade - it all goes over to Mac. Right now I'm half PC half Mac and I've been more impressed with the Mac end of my home network (minus a few details). But, I've been hearing some troubling things over this new Intel-Mac and backwards compatability. Further, developers having to learn a whole new SDK to build for the new Mac might slow up the release of fully compatable upgrades. If Rosetta is anything like the Java runtime engine, that would not be a good statement for it. If it is like Virtual PC, that would be even worse. It may not be until Carrara 7 and Poser 8 that we get a Mac version that is again even even to the power of the PC version on a comparable system... Plus, now that Apple is going the Intel route, I worry that it might mean future Apples are built by the same 'lowest bidder' process that packaged PCs are - meaning identically spec'd Apples could be completely different in quality of parts and performance.

Apple has already been doing that(bid process).

arcady, This is not much different from back in 94/95 when they switched over to the first PowerPC RISC chips. They had an emulation layer to run non-native applications on the newer systems. The same thing happened back then as the new hardware ran the non-native applications slower then the previous hardware. It wasn't long before developers caught up. As for learning a new SDK, developers don't have to do this. If there app uses the Cocoa framework and is developed with XCode, it is a simple matter to compile it as a universal app. The web browser experiment I wrote, compiles as Universal with absolutely no code changes... The problem is that a lot of developers don't use Apples Development Tools and use the Carbon API instead of Cocoa. This presents more of a challenge to get a universal binary as they first have to port their code to Cocoa and that is not always an easy or short fix. My guess is that Carrara and many other 3D apps are using Carbon and possibly Code Warrior so they can develop cross platform. These type of apps are going to require a bit of time to change over. Regards, Paul