I rendered spooky final off the content cd (I copied it to a local disk for each test to take the cd drive out of the equation) for C2 tonight on a couple macs and a pc to compare performance. Athlon 2100+/512MB DDR PC-2100 SDRAM/7200 RPM disk with DMA enabled/Win 98 SE: 3 minutes, 20 seconds eMac 800mhz G4 384 MB 133 SDRAM/5400 RPM disk Mac OSX: 8 minutes 54 seconds G3 blue & white 400 mhz 256 MB 100 SDRAM/5400 RPM disk Mac OSX: 13 minutes 56 seconds Do cpu, ram and disk contribute equally to render times or is rendering typically bottlenecked by just one of them? I guess I'm wondering why my friendly little eMac lagged so far behind the PC (at that rate rustboy will never get finished!) Does anyone know if the new dual G4s (like the dual 1ghz model) would tend to render faster than the eMac?

That's actually about what I've seen between my PCs and Macs too. I'm running a dual800G4, a dual800PIII, a single P4, a single 1Ghz PIII mobile, and got rid of an old G3 iMac at the beginning of the year. Unless the program is optimize for altivec and the PC version is not optimized for SSE, a G4 runs pretty close to what a PIII or newer P4 does at the same mhz.

The new dual 1ghz will be significantly faster than the eMac. I think the eMacs are shy some L3 cache plus of course the second processor.

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com

According to my calculator, (2100/800)*200=525 or 8 min. 45 sec., so the EMac and Athlon are running proportionally on the money, same performance per MHz. In theory you might get faster performance per MHz from those new Macs that alledgedly do calculations on both the upward and downward edges of a cycle.

Went to the local mac store today and ran the same test on a new dual 867 with 256MB of RAM under OSX. Elapsed time was 7 minutes, 8 seconds. I ran top in a terminal window during the test and the cpu percentage was running way above 100% (which I believe signifies both processors cranking away). In the preview window Carrara was even showing colored box overlays zipping around with 1 and 2 in them (I think signifying the use of both processors). I had thought the render time would be more on par with the PC (because of the dual processors) but it really wasn't that much faster than the eMac. It did seem to be maxing out on the available RAM so maybe adding RAM to the box would have improved things considerably. I ran some iMovie tests (rendering transitions and effects) as well and they showed about a 30% improvement over the eMac. All in all, though, it doesn't seem like having a dual means everything automagically goes twice as fast (unless the problem is just that 256 mb of ram isn't nearly enough to get full value out of the dual cpus). It could be that the duals are still very useful in that you can get away with doing more than one thing at a time more easily than with a single cpu box. For now, though, I think I'll stick with my friendly little eMac. If someone offered me the high-end dual 1.25 GHz G4 then it might be a different story (but you could custom build a little render farm of really fast pcs for the price of that sucker).

Are these renders done using the latest version of C2? The reason I ask is that there is a bug that was fixed with the patch that could cause rendering time to not be enhanced, or actually go slower when on a Dual. As for the AMD, is it a 2.1GHZ? I do know that for rendering, the AMD processors are known to produce faster renders. Also the G4 velocity engine is no use for the calculations required for a 3d app. From what I have heard, the G5 or IBM's new Power4 chip (both 64bit) will take care of this. Rumpr hass it that the current mac speeds will be 2-4x faster come early next year, hopefully Macworld SF in Jan. I sure hope Jobs and company do something, because in this area, the Mac gets killed. It is odd though, because my Raydream copy always renderd faster on my old mac (604-166mhz) then it did on my PC at the time (p2-300). Go figure! I guess it could be do to code optimizations too. Well this is one reason I own both a PC and a Mac. Graphics/Web/Dev work on Mac, games on PC! -Paul

The 2100+ runs at 1.8 but (according to AMD) is supposed to be equivalent to a Pentium 4 2.1 Can any of you Pentium 4 users out there beat my time of 3 minutes, 20 seconds for spooky final off the content cd? Just copy it to your local disk, load it up, and hit Render. Then you can look under Progress/Statistics in the Render room to see how long it took. Any dual 1.25 GHz G4 users out there? Seems like that box may be a sweet one performance-wise (but it better be for the price!) The PC test was done with the latest patch but the Mac tests were done without the patch. Just installed the patch on my eMac and the render time went way up to a whopping 14 minutes and 33 seconds. I wonder if there's a problem with the patch because this is a significant slowdown and I ran the test twice to make sure. I just fired off a note to tech support advising them to run their own tests to see if I've discovered a real problem. In the meantime C2 rendering in our studio will be done on the PC!

hartcons,

It tooks 4m 19s on a P4 2.26, so for Carrara at least it runs quite a bit better than a 2.1! For those interested, on my dual 800 G4 it took 11m 47s and a 1ghz PIII took 6m 10s. All were running the patched version.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Interesting. The guy at pcclub/www.pcclub.com (I took the plunge and built my own pc) said that the Athlon chip is known for having good floating point performance (which I imagine is helpful for 3D rendering?).

Floating point makes a big difference when it comes to rendering. The more numbers you can crack apart, the faster it will happen! -Kix

Here's another side point: there are some major performance gains in rendering between OS 9 and OS X (both unpatched and patched). I haven't gotten around to timing things out yet, but the "OS X native" version of Carrara 2.0 seems to render about half as fast as my OS 9 install (I got bored a while ago and started trying cross render tests.) I haven't played with the Spooky animation, so I'll do some experiments. By the way, I'm on a dual 1 gHz...I wonder if that step up to the new machine is really that big of a speed bump?

Wow...badly written post there...that's what I get for being online at 2:00 AM...I actually mean to say that OS X Carrara is much SLOWER than OS 9. More caffeene now.

I read that the dual 1.25 ghz is basically just an overclocked version of the 1ghz dual and that because of the heat the machine has lots of holes and fans and is quite noisy. I think there's a lot to like about OSX but performance (at least vs OS9) doesn't seem to be one of them! Starting in January, I've heard that new macs won't be able to boot into OS9.