topic rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . . in Installation & update

rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

__archiben — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 04:50:48 GMT

i've been having some lightworks fun . . .

THE FILE
1.3MB compressed. render size: 1400x918 pixels. lightworks photorender settings were all 'best' with all effects on. 'sun', 'ambient' and 'lamps' on, 'camera light' off. realistic sun used with a sample rate of 64 and divergence of 2º. there were 13 window lights and 1 additional sun object (The Dwight Undersun™). the polycount stats for the file are attached as a screenshot. no other apps were running. there was a lot of glass - and therefore reflectance - in the render . . .

THE MACTEL
archicad 10 INT mactel (build 943) on 2.16GHz intel core duo, 2GB ram and 256MB ATI video card + OSX 10.4.7 ...
open 3D window (openGL) - 15 seconds
the render - 10 minutes and 4 seconds

THE QUAD
archicad 10 NZE (build 966) on G5 Quad - 4 x 2.5GHz PowerPC G5, 4.5 GB ram and 256MB nvidia video card + OSX 10.4.7 ...
open 3D window (openGL) - 15 seconds
the render - 26 minutes and 59 seconds

THE DUALIES
archicad 10 NZE (build 966) on G5 Dual - 2 x 2GHz PowerPC G5, 2.5 GB ram and 128MB nvidia video card + OSX 10.4.7 ...
open 3D window (openGL) - 19 seconds
the render - 17 minutes and 30 seconds

archicad 10 NZE (build 817) on G5 Dual - 2 x 2.5GHz PowerPC G5, 2.5 GB ram and 128MB ATI video card + OSX 10.3.9 ...
open 3D window (openGL) - 17 seconds
the render - crashed after 3 minutes and 55 seconds - having already placed the background image upside down!

same machine as above, but upgraded to archicad 10 NZE (build 966)...
open 3D window (openGL) - 17 seconds
the render - 17 minutes and 14 seconds

THE MONGREL
archicad 10 INT (build 966) on 2.16GHz intel core duo, 2GB ram and 256MB ATI video card booted into windows XPpro SP2 ...
open 3D window (openGL) - 24 seconds
the render - 27 minutes and 51 seconds

some of my thoughts and hunches . . .

1. mactel is good.
2. there is something wrong with the quad . . . or something wrong in the way that lightworks address dual-cores . . .
3. boot camp public beta still has a long way to go before the windows hardware drivers are using the chips as efficiently as OSX?

your thoughts?
graphisoft's thoughts?

~/archiben

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:34:53 GMT

Hopefully we will see some new mac pros today, that will really give Archicad a good work out. It would also be interesting to see a few benchmarks once somebody has got their hands on one of these new beauties.

Would also be interesting to see how the new mactels square up against a similiarly specced DELL or similiar, would they be comparable in Archicad rendering tasks?

After years of Apple computer lagging behind PC's in rendering, it would be great if they took the rendering speed crown from PC's again.

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

__archiben — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 05:31:29 GMT

~/archiben wrote:
2. there is something wrong with the quad . . . or something wrong in the way that lightworks address dual-cores . . .

i've just run the render again with 'activity monitor' active . . . all four chips are showing as having fired up and the CPU usage is showing at 220.5% (both processors running) . . .

why's the quad so far behind the dualies?

i've also downloaded the lastest boot camp beta from apple and will run the winXP render again once i've installed . . .

~/archiben

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:35:35 GMT

~/archiben wrote:
1. mactel is good.

Very.

3. boot camp public beta still has a long way to go before the windows hardware drivers are using the chips as efficiently as OSX?

It's not BootCamp, it's Windows. My MacBook Pro is way faster than 2GHz Pentium M machines. We were running four of then in a training today (some nearly brand new) and they were painfully slow by comparison. (These were small practice files with less than a few dozen elements - so it wasn't the complexity.) I haven't had the chance to compare to another Core Duo but according to the tests I've read the MBP beats the equivalent Dell by a modest margin (and at about the same price).

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:46:43 GMT

Lennox wrote:
After years of Apple computer lagging behind PC's in rendering, it would be great if they took the rendering speed crown from PC's again.

It's already done. My MBP is faster than anything at one of my client's offices - and that's running Windows. It is even better running OS X. (I'll have to test it against the special rendering workstation at my other client's place.)

Now with the really fast quad core Xeon 64bit machines it should start to get interesting. And Leopard promises to be much faster than Tiger (even on the old PPC hardware). Somehow I don't think performance improvements are going to be a big feature in Vista.

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Thomas Holm — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:17:08 GMT

Matthew wrote:
It's not BootCamp, it's Windows.

I've heard memory handling is much improved in 64bit Windows (required for letting Archicad use more than 2GB memory when renderingin Windows, as I recall it from other threads in this forum).

It would be interesting to see a comparison with a Windows CoreDuo machine running the 64-bit enabled version of Windows.

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

__archiben — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 03:07:43 GMT

as a follow-up, the guys at cadconsult here in NZ ran the same file, same settings, same render on their macbook 1.83GHz, 2GB Ram with integrated intel graphics card. . .

CadConsult's wrote:
LightWorks Rendering Engine
Initialization : 0.00 s
Model generation : 9.60 s
Rendering : 612.58 s
Termination : 0.00 s
.................................................................
Elapsed time : 622.18 s
----------------------------------------------------

. . . which comes in at 9.6 seconds for the 3D window generation and 10 minutes 12 seconds for the render!

pretty good considering the price of the macbooks when compared with the macbook pros and the xeons!

btw - has anyone got a xeon and wants to run the same file for comparison?

~/archiben

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 19:06:47 GMT

this graph can show a pretty good idea of where the new intel macs are at speed wise, it would be nice to see where a PC is in that line up too!!

the graph came from architosh who pinched it from Graphisoft I think!

This puts the new core duo mac mini that I have just bought, about the same kind of speed as the Dual 2.5Ghz . Praise the lord

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:25:15 GMT

Is this so only 10'12"

~/archiben wrote:
as a follow-up, the guys at cadconsult here in NZ ran the same file, same settings, same render on their macbook 1.83GHz, 2GB Ram with integrated intel graphics card. . .

CadConsult's wrote:
LightWorks Rendering Engine
Initialization : 0.00 s
Model generation : 9.60 s
Rendering : 612.58 s
Termination : 0.00 s
.................................................................
Elapsed time : 622.18 s
----------------------------------------------------
. . . which comes in at 9.6 seconds for the 3D window generation and 10 minutes 12 seconds for the render!

pretty good considering the price of the macbooks when compared with the macbook pros and the xeons!

btw - has anyone got a xeon and wants to run the same file for comparison?

~/archiben

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

__archiben — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:10:37 GMT

Adalbert wrote:
Is this so only 10'12"

it is indeed so. mactel is good!

~/archiben

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:48:42 GMT

How could it be 64 against 256, Intel will drive ATI out of business>

I am tempted to by the Macbook and not the pro.
I wonder, is there any difference with an attached cinema display, after all it has only 64MB of RAM.

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

__archiben — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 01:08:55 GMT

Adalbert wrote:
How could it be 64 against 256, Intel will drive ATI out of business>

probably part of the intention?

I am tempted to by the Macbook and not the pro.

from those results it's not a bad option. screen sized would put me off though. but...

I wonder, is there any difference with an attached cinema display, after all it has only 64MB of RAM.

with the 'integrated graphics' it's not the size so much as how it's being used in conjunction with the main, processor, memory. i too would love to know how 'integrated graphics' performs with a second monitor. i'll try to find out . . .

~/archiben

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 19:12:08 GMT

I would like to know how does the Macbook with am externat monitor since I urgently need to by a new laptop PC compatible. Has any of you experience with this?

I bought RISA 3D ( $5,000), it is fantastic, no more structural engineers for me I wish all architect wold listen and learn ti use it.

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Rob — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:55:51 GMT

I bought RISA 3D ( $5,000), it is fantastic, no more structural engineers for me I wish all architect wold listen and learn ti use it.

mate, I wish you a good luck with extra liability for the structural design done in-house. I prefer to sleep well...

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Thomas Holm — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 11:06:11 GMT

Rob wrote:
mate, I wish you a good luck with extra liability for the structural design done in-house. I prefer to sleep well...

Hear, hear!... How much is the insurance in the U.S. for a person doing structural designs without certification? Does RISA cover it?

Re: rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:48:11 GMT

In the US an Architect License certifies for any structural work. The insurance is comensural with the rest od the fields. One declares how much is the built volume and cost and what aspect are to be covered. Un the context of the rest structural is more per sq ft because the structure is not such a large percentage of the total cost. If one does not do structural soon it will do nothing because building departments are requiring structural for all aspect: from suspended ceilings to equipment mounts and how this efects the entire lateral force capability of the entire structure.