Played with the G5 1.6 and 1.8 yesterday...

[Santilli]

It's kind of funny. They seem to work ok. Still, no blinding OS speed,
it just doesn't feel like that much of a jump in speed.

I wonder if the OS uses VM too much, slowing it down. I also wonder
if with 8 gig of RAM the machine would be really fast.

It could also be GPU limited, since both machines used huge
LCD screens. Weird.

Could be the hard drives are just the limiting factor.

s

 

[timwhit]

MacOS has never seemed to be a very fast OS, no matter what kind of CPU it has. OS X is even worse in this regard. I think the OS designers made it look very pretty, but they didn't make it run very fast.

 

[Pradeep]

It's kind of funny. They seem to work ok. Still, no blinding OS speed,
it just doesn't feel like that much of a jump in speed.

Sadly for the price they are asking, blinding speed is required. Of course for those who are enveloped in the RDF (Reality Distortion Field), these machines are "faster than light", "supercomputers" etc ad nauseum. I believe they can be equipped with the 9800 Pro viddy card? Should be sufficient.

 

[Mercutio]

OS X has a completely 3D desktop. It's not just that it's pretty, it's stuff like extremely high-quality video scaling, too. The system would probably be quite a bit more responsive with a fast 3D card.

May I also remind everyone, as someone who has used NT since the 3.1 release, that early versions were nothing like responsive, fast systems either. I don't think performance really got acceptable until PCs got 200MHz and 128MB RAM, which is quite substantial considering that the early versions ran on 16MHz PCs with 12MB RAM.

 

[CougTek]

Yeah but OS X still isn't very responsive even with 2GHz processors, which makes it 10 times worst than early Windows version. That's quite awful if you ask me.

 

[blakerwry]

really? i never had a responsiveness problem with NT 4.0 SP4 or below on a 486 66MHz CPU... as long as you don't run out of RAM you're fine (I think pre SP6 and with no defragger the system use less than 24MB on boot).

 

[Santilli]

Loading Safari, and other programs took a long time. They had a really slow internet connection as well. I watched some movie trailers, and the
included speaker is terrible, video quality very good, at certain resolutions.

I noticed at 1024X the picture was poor, lettering fuzzy. It likes higher resolutions.

For the money they are asking, those machines should come with a high end video card installed.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB DDR SDRAM NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB DDR SDRAM ATI RADEON 9600 Pro with 64MB DDR SDRAM

So you only get a fast video card if you buy the most expensive model.

Aren't the Nvidia cards low end?

Why do the cards have so little RAM?

Seems like for a 3D OS you would want more ram.

Overall, I kind of suspected this is what would happen. Somehow they managed to take a great processor, and, in the overall packaging, make a very underwhelming, unresponsive, computer. An Apple trademark.

Probably the drives are the worst part. Stuff just loads slowly, and, if the OS hits the pagefile much, slow OS is the result.

gs

 

[Santilli]

A real Apple deal. Take a really fast gpu, and cripple it by using 64 mb of slow ram :roll:

Oh well, that's life, and Apple.

gs

 

[Mercutio]

really? i never had a responsiveness problem with NT 4.0 SP4 or below on a 486 66MHz CPU...

On NT, or even Win2000, it's easy to get to places where you can type faster than the letters can be displayed. This was absolutely the norm with everything prior to NT4. With NT4 things started to get better. I'm not sure whether to attribute the increased responsiveness to NT or to better hardware, but I do know that a P5-133 with a then-generous 64MB of RAM could be charitably described as "inert" for tasks that required considerable user input.

 

[Pradeep]

I noticed at 1024X the picture was poor, lettering fuzzy. It likes higher resolutions.
gs

LCDs always look like crap in anything but their native resolution.

 

[Buck]

... as long as you don't run out of RAM you're fine

Any operating system based on NT requires oodles of RAM and a large swap file (preferably on a different channel for ATA).

 

[Santilli]

Kind of wondering if 2000 gets much faster if it goes from 512 mb to 1 gig, 2 gig, 4 gig?

What's the best bang for the buck level?
GS

 

[mubs]

384MB, IIRC. After that you get diminishing returns, unless you're doing heavy duty Photoshopping and like stuff.

 

[Buck]

Kind of wondering if 2000 gets much faster if it goes from 512 mb to 1 gig, 2 gig, 4 gig?

What's the best bang for the buck level?
GS

SG, with NT based operating systems, the amount of RAM you have can easily be gobbled up by services. By leaning out your services, you can reduce the amount of memory required. But as a rule, I start at 512MB. Beyond that amount, you're really supporting auxiliary programs, so you would need to research their requirements first.

 

[Santilli]

Thanks Buck.
I've gone through my services and turned off all the stuff I don't use.

With my mobo only having two slots, 512 is pretty much what I'm stuck with, unless I want to replace both.

Greg

 

[Buck]

Thanks Buck.
I've gone through my services and turned off all the stuff I don't use.

With my mobo only having two slots, 512 is pretty much what I'm stuck with, unless I want to replace both.

Greg

You're welcome SG. You should be fine doing office tasks with that much memory. You should even be able to accomplish basic Photoshop tasks easily. I do most of my Photoshop work on a PIII 1.2 GHz, 512MB PC-133 SDRAM, and a ATI 9000 video card outfitted system.

 

[EdwardK]

A real Apple deal. Take a really fast gpu, and cripple it by using 64 mb of slow ram :roll:

Oh well, that's life, and Apple.

gs

I'm not sure if this is still correct or not but isn't the Mac versions of video cards slightly different from their PC counterparts? Isn't this because of the proprietary Mac motherboard/codes? :evil:

Cheers,
Edward

 

[e_dawg]

Why would you need more than 64 MB of video RAM at 1024?

 

[blakerwry]

i dont think most people know what video RAM even does... they just see more and think it's automatically better. More RAM typically does not make a card faster. It only helps if your card is out of RAM and has to keep fetching textures from the system RAM, or ::shudder:: the hard drive.

The main point of video RAM is to act as a frame buffer, having more frame buffer allows you to use higher resolutions and to buffer more frames (you dont actually want to buffer too many frames or you'll experience lag.. 3 seems to be a good number.


Since 3D graphics became popular, the use of texture RAM has come into play. Cards need high speed RAM to process and hold textures for quick use. If the card can't hold a texture (textures are usually loaded at the beginning of a level)then it has to be pulled from main system RAM during game time.. which can lead to a momentary slowdown.

Most textures come in various sizes. 512x512 is about the largest(best detail) you'll see in a 3D game. So, taking the 512x512 texture as an example, each 512x512 texture is taking up about 1MB of RAM. A year ago the largest texture you'd see was 256x256, a year before that 128x128. In fact I think cards like the voodoo2/3 and TNT could not even display higher than 256 or 512 pixel textures.

Even a game that makes use of 512 pixel textures is still going to use lower resolution textures for things that don't require alot of detail. The sky and ground, and other environmental objects usually require alot less detail than say a marble finished wall or a soldier's uniform with decals.

So if you have a modern game you can expect the textures to maybe be an average of about 256x256x32 (32 bits of color) you could probably fit about 100 textures in the average 32MB video card's memory, double that or more for a 64. That really is alot for a single level, and we are talking high resolution textures.

 

[Pradeep]

A real Apple deal. Take a really fast gpu, and cripple it by using 64 mb of slow ram :roll:

Oh well, that's life, and Apple.

gs

I'm not sure if this is still correct or not but isn't the Mac versions of video cards slightly different from their PC counterparts? Isn't this because of the proprietary Mac motherboard/codes? :evil:

Cheers,
Edward

They are different, mostly because they need to supply 24 or 36V to drive the monitor power via the ADC connection. I believe there is a header on the mobo that connects to the graphics card for this. Some people have flashed PC firmware versions into Mac versions I believe. But it's not an easy task. When you buy a Mac, you are going into a vertically integrated high margin cesspool.

 

[Pradeep]

Why would you need more than 64 MB of video RAM at 1024?

I assume Greg dropped the rez down on the LCD panel, the high end panel runs at 1920*1200(1024?) I believe.

 

[Buck]

It just dawned on me, I've switched Greg's initials in my posts (SG) -- sheeeesh! Sorry about that GS.

 

[mubs]

vertically integrated high margin cesspool

Neato! You have a way with words, young man!

 

[zx]

Thanks for your impressions on the G5 Greg. I thought that the G5's would feel faster than PC's. But it seems it's not the case.

For Windows 2000, I noticed that you can't feel any speen increase when adding RAM beyond 256MB for light stuff (internet, word, excel) and 512MB for heavy duty (games, non-professionnal photoshop). I have 1.5 GB of RAM and it's not faster than 256MB when surfing the net or playing Counter-Strike.

 

[Santilli]

OK:
Here's part of the video theory. Quartz Extreme is supposed to be a 3D os. Isn't it possible that the lack of video ram really cripples the OS impressions, and games on the mac? Native for those giant LCD's is 1900X or something like that.

I was going to try lower resolutions, since in the past that's been one of the problems with the displays, they don't display reasonable work resolutions well, and at their native, the type is so small you can't read it without a magnifying glass.

Spent a good part of the day loading software on the school's imac, so, you see, it's important to have both os 9 and X, since most of the old software is run on 9.

X is snappier on my laptop with a new shell then it was on the G5's.

Actually, that gave me an idea. Bring my lombard in and compare the two...


Perhaps the priorities on the different functions don't put enough processor
priority on OS functions that are what are viewed as speed?

It's just with a 64 bit os, one thinks it would fly on decent hardware, if the hardware takes advantage of it. Perhaps that's the problem(s).
Look at the biggest bottleneck, and it's usually the bus. Apparently
Apple took that wonderful processor, and used 33/66 mhz bus, IIRC for pci slots, and who knows what they did to the hard drive interface. Used a really cheap chip, limited to a slow data transfer rate? They have done that before...
gs

gs

 

[blakerwry]

like I said before, more RAM doesn't usually make a game faster.. just like system RAM, you'll notice a point where it doesn't make things run any faster.. That point depends on the game and the level(or in this instance the dekstop and its theme along with what programs are open). 64MB is still more than enough for games. On something like an OS you're going to have reletively few textures, and most of those will be medium to low detail.

So that just leaves frame buffer. on a 1900x1200x32bit screen you'd need about 32MB of RAM to buffer 3 frames.. that is quite alot. I suspect most cards at the moment probably max out at 24MB or less, so it could be possible that the card can only hold 2 frames in RAM at a time. This could be responsible for the slowdown. If you drop the res to something like 1600*1000 and the speed improves then it could be that the card 's frame buffer is the limiting factor.


*note: frame buffer on older cards was seperate, fixed at a finite amount and not shared w/ texture RAM(Voodoo/TNT cards come to mind). New cards have come out that do allow shared frambuffer and texture RAM so that depending on the resolution you can allocate more RAM to the frame buffer. I'm not sure what the limits are, this probably depends on the card and its firmware.

 

[Pradeep]

I believe one of the problems with Quartz is that many of the operations aren't hardware accelerated.

 

[blakerwry]

that would be pretty bad for a 3D OS.....

 

[B4RSK]

Mixed replies here, it gets kind of jumpy!

-----
NT4 became noticibly faster than 3.x because the video drivers were moved to Ring 0 execution. The downside to this is that a bad video driver gives a BSOD... But if the processor has to change rings every time the display needs to be updated, it makes the machine really slow.

-----
NT4 runs without trouble on a Pentium 133 with 128MB of RAM. Slow boot, but once the apps are open, everything is fine. I wouldn't suggest photo editing though...

-----
More memory on a video card won't help except in certain 3D games. 16MB is ample for Windowing systems unless you need an extremely high resolution with 32bit colour.

The speed of the memory is typically more important than the overall amount (as long as you have 16MB or more that is).

-----
My understanding is also that Quartz is lacking in hardware exceleration, though it is better than the earliest versions.

-----
If Greg can imagine he's in Japan, then SG is the correct way to write his initials.

-----
Guess I could have split all that into separate messages, but they didn't seem long enough to warrant it...

Ian

 

[EdwardK]

Hello Ian,

Since you are currently residing in Japan, you are the best person "on the streets" to know about Japanese trends :wink: My question is: Are Apple Macs still strong in Japan? I seem to read many moons ago, Apple would go out of their way to entice Japanese customers, and Steve Jobs would make special efforts to open MacWorld Tokyo.

Cheers,
Edward

 

[Santilli]

Imagine I'm in Japan? Hello!!! I married Ho Hae Kang, a Korean girl living in Osaka. I've been to Osaka 3 times?

Yes, and, I have survival Japanese, sort of.

I remember walking places Gaijins never go, looking at advanced electronics, 10 years ahead of the stuff shipped to the US.

In Osaka Hilton, in 1992, we could flip a button and go from Japanese, to english on the tv. Do we have that here, yet?????
gs

 

[SteveC]

In Osaka Hilton, in 1992, we could flip a button and go from Japanese, to english on the tv. Do we have that here, yet?????
gs

SAP.

 

[EdwardK]

Imagine I'm in Japan? Hello!!! I married Ho Hae Kang, a Korean girl living in Osaka. I've been to Osaka 3 times?

Yes, and, I have survival Japanese, sort of.

I remember walking places Gaijins never go, looking at advanced electronics, 10 years ahead of the stuff shipped to the US.

In Osaka Hilton, in 1992, we could flip a button and go from Japanese, to english on the tv. Do we have that here, yet?????
gs

Opps, Sorry GS. I did not know your background otherwise I would also had asked you. Me bad!

Cheers,
Edward

 

[Jake the Dog]

Imagine I'm in Japan? Hello!!! I married Ho Hae Kang, a Korean girl living in Osaka. I've been to Osaka 3 times?

Yes, and, I have survival Japanese, sort of.

I remember walking places Gaijins never go, looking at advanced electronics, 10 years ahead of the stuff shipped to the US.

In Osaka Hilton, in 1992, we could flip a button and go from Japanese, to english on the tv. Do we have that here, yet?????
gs

lol!

 

[B4RSK]

Imagine I'm in Japan? Hello!!! I married Ho Hae Kang, a Korean girl living in Osaka. I've been to Osaka 3 times?

Yes, and, I have survival Japanese, sort of.

I remember walking places Gaijins never go, looking at advanced electronics, 10 years ahead of the stuff shipped to the US.

In Osaka Hilton, in 1992, we could flip a button and go from Japanese, to english on the tv. Do we have that here, yet?????
gs

Any plans to come back to Osaka Greg? Did you live here before?

I was quite impressed with the bilingual TV when I arrived here in 1993 too. Even though it is just stereo TV with one channel for Japanese and the other for English, it works well. Unless you have an old TV that was stereo, but not bilingual capable -- in that case you get one language from each speaker and rapidly go insane...

The electronics district of Osaka (and Akihabara in Tokyo) are still very good. The time lags between releases in Japan and releases in the rest of the world are small these days though. We still get stuff here (like my Crusoe-based Toshiba Libretto notebook) that isn't available overseas though.

Ian

 

[B4RSK]

Hello Ian,

Since you are currently residing in Japan, you are the best person "on the streets" to know about Japanese trends :wink: My question is: Are Apple Macs still strong in Japan? I seem to read many moons ago, Apple would go out of their way to entice Japanese customers, and Steve Jobs would make special efforts to open MacWorld Tokyo.

Cheers,
Edward

I don't have any hard figures, but my feeling is that Apple does roughly the same here as elsewhere.

I think Japan is still the #2 market for Apple, following the US, but with the advent of cheap Wintell machines and the post-bubble reduction of spending, Apple has lost market here too.

I just bought a 40GB iPod though. Very happy with it too!

Ian

 

[CityK]

I played (very briefly) around with a couple of G5's today.

One of them was outfitted with a plexiglass display widow on the right side of the box. Asthetically speaking, the design is quite nice. The heat sink on the processor is freaking huge! - it looks like a car stereo amp.

The machines were very quite. Can't remember if it was 3 or 5 fans that were running. Definitely two exhausts at the back exhausting, and one in front of the HS. Might have been two in the front of the case too, but I cant remember now.

I have no idea how easy the front comes off, but it may prove a hassle if something goes wrong with the burner - no direct access. I said to the sales guy - "how do you eject a disk if the tray refuses to open?" "Oh its all through software, see - you just click on this". "Okay, thats nice, but alternatively, what if the software becomes unresponsive...how do you eject a disk??" "Oh well, you see its all through software, see - you just click on this". "Okay. I'm going to stand over here now. Please don't follow me."

I launched a couple of programs. Longest load I saw was with Final Cut....Mind you, it was only a little bit slower then when the (bloated) Acrobat Reader 6 loads up on a PC

Because I have no clue about how to operate OS X or what to do with a Mac, I cut my test drive short. Plus I really can't figure that "mouse" out - that thing alone I found slow and unresponsive.

CK

 

[CityK]

I should have added that the physical space provided by the 23" Cinema Displays is nothing short of awesome....looks at crappy temporary monitor and cries

 

[Santilli]

The English Computer paper that I can't spell, has pointed out the problem with the G5's is the os is 32 bit, running on a 64 bit processor. An emmulated OS?

In other words, true to form, Apple released the computers without an OS that takes full advantage of the processor design. :roll:

Maybe that's why the guys are waiting for panther. Still, to get a decent machine, you have to buy the dual processor top of the line, since the lower machines still use old PCI stuff, vs. the new PCI-X, which the top of the line machine ships with.

gs

 

[Mercutio]

386 CPUs ran 16-bit Windows 3.1 pretty well, despite being 32-bit processors. I'll bet Athlon 64's do OK with XP, too. Running 32-bit code on a 64-bit chip is inefficient, sure, but if you remember back that far, it wasn't like you gained speed going from Windows 3.1 to OS/2, Linux or Windows 95.