Apple cooks the numbers, again?

Apple's new dual G5 PowerPC benchmarks look very impressive. When you look at the fairness of the benchmarks it becomes clear why...

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Naturally Apple wouldn’t be Apple if the Mac didn’t beat the Pentium 4 by nearly 100%, that’s to be expected with benchmark data coming from Apple. What’s surprising though is the fact that they also benchmarked an Athlon-64 and concluded it performed far, far worse than the Pentium 4.

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For example, instead of using Adobe Premiere on both the Apple and x86 platforms they used Final Cut Pro on the Apple platform and Adobe Premiere on the x86. Not surprising the results differ, in Apple’s favor.

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Tut, tut!

[The article]

and after using a couple of Boxx's for a little while (optimising them for rendering w/ 3ds max) - the dual opterons were damn fast. little slower than the dual xeon rigs we were using - if only because of the math co-pro - but their photon mapping and ray-tracing were far superior overall.
nice to see apple up to their old tricks

What's worth knowing is that the tests are shown not only on Apple's US site but also on its UK site:
http://www.apple.com/uk/powermac/performance/

That being so, my guess is that, in the UK, Intel and AMD will try to double-check these results and will then make a formal complaint about them if they don't stand up.

However, the tests aren't very well documented, so it may be difficult for these companies to replicate them accurately.

What I'd like to see happen, though, is for Hexus and DVdoctor to get hands on with all three of the Macs in question (or, at very least the fastest one), along with what we deem to be appropriate Intel-based and AMD-based comparative systems and carry out independent tests, especially of rendering of video and still imagery.

I suspect we won't have much difficulty getting kit from Windows PC system builders and would like to think we'll also be able to get hold of the Macs.

Afterall, why wouldn't Apple want independent tests carried out?

I'll speak to David and Paul and see if we can't give this a shot.


Bob Crabtree
DVdoctor

Worth adding, too, that there do seem to be rather a lot of significant changes in the latest version of Apple OS X - changes that speed up stuff like video and still image rendering, and the Mac tests were carried out using the latest Mac OS, 10.4 (Tiger).

Pick carefully among the pages here (highlighted by Rys on HEXUS's front news page, April 29th), and you'll get the idea:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/1

So let's not making too many assumptions just yet, for fear that what we are doing is showing our own prejudices, rather than making statement based firmly on facts.

Bob C

I'm fairly sure, that despite this - the apple platforms were optimised. I'd like it if apple could supply the source material with their shot/cut list and we'll see what we can do!
Would make a VERY interesting article.

I'm no Mac fanboy by any means but the reason they used Final Cut Pro on the Mac than Premiere Pro is because, from what i've read, there isn't a Premiere Pro for Mac. This is because FCP is so much faster (or lost the client-base) so Adobe dropped it on the Mac side. If there was no monkeying around with the video creation process, this would be a good comparison of the user experience of PC vs Mac.

The Adobe Order Page doesn't give the option to buy it for OSX.

My friend is thinking of switching over to OSX because he will be doing a lot of video editing and I'm helping him do some research on whether or not the switch is going to be a good investment. Does anyone have benchmarks that compares the fastest dual P4 to the fastest dual G5 in video editing tests?

Apple will not deal with the online press AFAIK, which is why most online reviews of Apple products will be biased (eg, the person reviewing the product had to lay down hard cash).

hate to say it zer0fill -
you won't find that comparison.
real world - pc is the only answer. look at any post-production company - look at avid. when I first started workin on avid kit - it was all mac based (over 10 years ago) now avid is PC only for it's professional products. still knocks the socks off premiere and fcp. always has, always will.
avid goes from strength to strength and is totally industry standard. it's now much more affordable, and they still do a couple of their dv products (read: pro-sumer) for mac iirc.

check it out. if they still do them, it's the only valid, industry standard benchmark that can be done between apple and pc kit. advantage number 1... they can both use the same rendering board and graphics cards.

http://www.avid.com/products/xpressdv/

yep - they still do it.

we were using it, and some of the bolt-ons for our cheap single processor edit stations - base unit - about 10 grand (including software, and dual monitors w/ 64bit meridian boards) then 25 grand of addons each. cheap. ;) well - for edit hardware at least :D high end suite, about £230,000 not including storage ;)