Stupid question probably, but I thought I would ask.

Thanks

The question has no validity without knowing the specs of each machine.

well ..i had today used Bryce 6.1 on both a MAC dual intel 2Gb mem.
And on a Pc win Xp pro AMD 2Ghz 64bit 2 Gb mem...
Same project that comes with Bryce 6.1 
Did a render ...pom pom ..MAC was done ...
Did a Render  Pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom pom... and still it was bizzy... it took the PC 10 times the time it took the MAC for the same render..
And on a Specs base the PC has faster parts ..than the Mac...

Im in love with my Mac ... and HASTELA - VISTA to windows ;}

Chris

Maybe you should stop all those millions of running processes on the windows machine. And perhaps the windows machine is using most of his power to phone home, scanning 500gig hds for viruses, blocking 65535 Ports for intrudes and does some other important things!

A Windows PC is busy to play with his OS, with other words :)

So, a Mac is surly not faster than a PC. But Windows is able to slow down any kind of hardware...

Well ..i did do all the things to make it a fair test ..
The Pc had No other thing to do then just render..
No virus scan resident or mail or taskmanager or what ff windows like to do while we use it..
All non realy needed things were stopped ..and No internet was conected ...
So i did a "fair" test .. buton the other hand ..on the Mac the internet was running and mail was online ..and the scanners were active...
So i think i can say my MAC was damn faster then my Pc..

Sure both machines are using the same type of memory and FSB-speed? Bad/cheap/slow memory may slow down a machine up to 25% (maybe more, but I didn't see that in real)

intel macs may have dozens of processes running by default. AFAIK they wrote the UB version of P7 to take advantage of the OS and chipset of that machine, hence a comparison with XP is likely unfair, as the XP machine will necessarily be much slower in all functions.

setting aside all the PC vs. Mac arguments, the answer is... it used to be the case, but I dunno about now. With a G4 or G5 Mac and Poser 5, you could up the bucket size on a render and speed the times up considerably. I saw at least a 50-60% faster render speed in Poser 5 when I upped the bucket size on my dual G5 (1.8GHz machine) to 256 from its defaults, but IIRC (not 100% sure), I believe that PC's were not able to make as good of a use of that aspect. w/ Poser 6, bucket size broke for some reason, but I still had the advantage (At least w/ a dual-proc Mac) of running a render in Poser, while at the same time surfing the web, doing practically anything else, up to and including program compiles, without bogging down the machine too much. Dual-proc (SMP) PC's could prolly also reap the same benefits, but SMP systems were kinda rare in the PC world until hyperthreading came out. Nowadays the hardware will be a lot more similar, so it comes down to OS efficiency and how much 'oomph' your hardware has. For example, a new top-end Mac (two Core Duos) w/ P7 would have an effective 4 processor pool, allowing max threads (how many is that in P7?) to chew on a render at once. A Mac Mini OTOH only has a single Core Duo, so you only get maybe 2-4 w/o slowing down the machine, depending. PC's would be very similar. a Pentium 4m w/ no hyperthreading would be very limited, while a top-end PC (assuming you don't have a multi-CPU motherboard) gives you a top-end Intel Core Duo, or whatever AMD makes to match that. (To be really obscene, if I turned loose one of my typical work servers on it --a pair of 3GHz Dual-Core Xeons w/ 16GB of DDR2 RAM and SAS hard drives-- I'd barely have time to lift my finger from the mouse key after clicking "render" before it was done.) As for running processes? Hard to tell. OSX has literally dozens running as mentioned, but Windows will hide a very large share of theirs from view by the user (which is why rootkits are so effective in Windows). Memory is handled very differently by the two OS types. OSX does on-the-fly defrag while Windows largely does not... and disk fragmentation can make a difference in render times since Poser reaches for and reads things like texture files, bump/displacement maps, and etc during a render. Finally, Registry integrity/corruption can play a small but notable part in how well Windows will perform a render. Then, there's Vista... a near-unknown because most proggies aren't written for it yet, especially its use of 64-bit extensions (as opposed to written for a generic Win32 API). So the answer today is.... "Maybe". /P

Quote - Then, there's Vista... a near-unknown because most proggies aren't written for it yet,

That is the understatement of the year.  I only tried Vista for about 8 hours and it drove me insane!  Driver incompatibilty errors galore not to mention that stupid permission for everything feature, even if you are the one and only admin on the computer!!!!   Most stupid OS that I've encountered out of the 5 that I've used.

Well, I have to say that I am very suprised by the response here.  I wasn't sure my question was posed properly and didn't really expect such a great discussion.  This has been quite infomative indeed!

I have been a Windows guy forever.  I knew Mac's were great graphics machines but this is sounding better and better all the time.  I wish Poser came in Linux format!  I could really go for that!

So if a guy who knew basically nothing about Mac's, what would this group recommend in the way of model and memory, CPU etc.  Anyone wanna upgrade?

Thanks again for all the discussion here!!

Nebula

For Macs - the hardware is pretty much the same as PC's... and Apple's Website (hit the "Store" tab once there) has all the prices. Just be prepared for a bit of sticker shock @ the upper reaches.

The plus side is that it keeps it's worth for a remarkably long time. I paid $2k for my Dual G5 in 2003-2004, stuffed 2GB of RAM in it, and it still troops along just fine today. Put it this way - it came with OSX 10.3, but I can stick in OSX 10.5 when it comes out w/o incident.

Regd's,

/P

A 2.66 Quad Mac Pro is the best buy (base, $2,500 with 1 GB RAM and 250 GB hard drive), beefed up with 4GB RAm, a graphics card upgrade (it really does help, especially if you're also doing video editing), and a larger hard drive should push you to about 4 grand. Non-Apple RAM is cheaper, but Apple is known for using "center cut filet" memory, so it may or may not be worth the extra. If money is an issue, I'd still stick with the 2.66 Mac Pro because it is easily upgradeable, while the iMacs (wonderful as they are -- I have a 24-incher, along with a Macbook Pro laptop and my Mac Pro workhorse) are more limited. I would also agree on their holding their value. I think my Mac G5 Dual is actually worth about what I paid for it about four years ago. Overall, the machines and the OS are just easier and more stable, and with Poser 7, it's a match made in heaven. But beware of Poser's latest service release!

Depends on the render engine too. In Vue 5 Infinite, a 2.4 Ghz Pentium4 on Windows XP SP2 rendered about twice as fast as a dual G5 1.8 Ghz (a Mac that was three times as expensive as that PC). Benchmark by louguet.

An interesting challenge1  so, I thought, how about running the same matching work on two matching machines.  I chose P3 because it has the easiest benchmark to work with.
In this corner: an iMac G3, 450 MHz, 256 Mb of RAM, OS 9.2
and in this corner: an NEC A1000, 450 MHz, 256 Mb of RAM, OS Win 98
In essence, both machines are identical (they even look the same, the NEC is single unit machine, built like an iMac), neither are connected to the internet.
Okay, first off, start the machines..... the iMac boots faster, go to make coffee while the PC is still spooling up.
Once the machines have warmed up, Open P3 (Freeware versions).  The PC opens the application faster.
Select Raptor from Figures, add the Groundplane, single source lighting overhead. Pose in killer stance.
Press Render......
the iMac rendered faster but not by much.
So, there you go, a true benchmark test .    

Don't get me wrong, I like Macs....   ;-)

When I had my last "real" job I was sort of the Mac specialiist too (I kept about 100 of 'em going), but that is somewhat ancent history, as I faded away back in the G4 days.

Let me say this though- no Mac, absolutely no Mac, has been as fas as a PC that cost the same in a long, long time. 

Apple's profit margin is far higher than anybody who makes PCs.  These days they are running about the same hardware too - back in the old, old days MACs had things like SCSI drives as standard, which no PC ever did.

Don't buy a MAC for speed. 

does a mac render come with extra fries i wonder

billy

I'd love to see a render speed comparison on a modern Intel Mac with Bootcamp. That way you're sure the hardware is identical, and that any speed difference is due to the operating system.
Unless Bootcamp is a virtual machine type of solution, of course. Which I do not know, like billy423uk the only Macs I know are those you get at the fastfood chain....

lol I really don't care about render times at this point. What I do care about is the fact that most programs and updates come out for the pc first, which means in the long run I will get my work done when I need to. If you want to buy a mac buy a mac. If you want to buy a pc buy a pc. Buy what makes you happy and don't worry about what other folks are running. Seems like this is turning into one of those types of threads that gets beat to death about every other week.  8^)
Is mac better than pc...is it child porn....oh no they pulled my perfectly acceptable pic from the gallery. Sorry, just gets old. I remember my maya instructor telling me how exciting it was to finally get maya for the mac, two years ago. If I had started with mac I might have stuck, but for me I like pc and doubt, especially after working on the macs at the school, that I will ever change now. But.....ya never know. I might just up and buy one next week....lol

To tell the truth, I think Mac's interface went downhill with OS 10. 

Bear in mind, I'm talking about the interface itself, not the features.  OS 9 was (to my mind) the perfect compter interface, it operated in a logical manner, and compared to Windows it was a lot less "Gee-Wiz", a much more minimal, simple interface.  I think OS 10 is way too much "lets make it like Windows", myself.

I think the applications should be the stars, not the interface itself.  Of course this flies 100% against the current grain, Microsoft in particular wants you to buy and convert to a new, even more top heavy operating system every three years or so, so they can keep the money rolling in.  Vista is a perfect example of where this is leading, slower, bigger, bloated, and filled with features that many will never use. 

Meanwhile, I'm still back two generations, on Windows 2000, which may be the best one MS ever made.  I put it on my two-montgh old computer, too, no problems, all the new hardware still supports it.

I'd like to get a Mac too, though...    Maybe an old G4 running OS 9!

I dunno... As a guy who is intimately familiar with User Interfaces in Win32, KDE, GNOME, Fluxbox (almost about as minimal as it gets), Opie (a nice little PDA User Interface), MacOS 5-9, and OSX... I gotta say it: OSX holds a shared 1st-place for interfaces, along with Gnome. Both are clean, useful, and aside from a couple of tiny features I wish each had (an "auto-Ditto" file/directory merging function in OSX ferinstance), they're nearly perfect for me. OSX is extraordinarily easy to get apps running out of. My most used apps sit in the Dock (where they're easily organized, instead of all spread out in zillions of shortcut icons), and otherwise I drift my cursor to the top bar and click Go -} Applications-} (pick your app). Of course, shortcuts on the desktop bypasses all that. IMVHO, I think Vista is Microsoft's attempt at emulating OSX in many features and functions, so if anything, I suspect that either way, you're kinda stuck if you don't like it. Between current existing Windows desktops, I agree with you - Win2k has the cleanest lines of them all (w/o going into "Classic" mode like on XP and Vista(?) ). Problem is, Microsoft stopped supporting it for most patches long ago, and security patches are either gone or about to be gone for it. I suppose you can still flip to "classic" mode in Vista (I know you can in XP) to get the same look and feel as Win2k... but, I think that the UI will still have the slower responsiveness of the underlying OS in Vista (though in XP going to 'classic' mode did speed things up appreciably). /P