topic Re: Mac Pro benchmarks in Installation & update

Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:50:59 GMT

Anyone have benchmarks yet? I'm curious if this is the machine to beat now.

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:27:54 GMT

Yep - It kicks some serious butt.

http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/macpro3ghzbench/index.php

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:33:55 GMT

Well, I meant ArchiCAD 10 benchmarks. 😉

Actually, I went to the apple store at lunch and I'm running a rendering test on their 2.66 quad core w/ 3 GB RAM as we speak. The apple salesperson should be calling me with the results soon.

At the same time I'm running it on my PC (Specs below). We'll see who wins.

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:13:11 GMT

The results are in:

Mac Pro 2.66x4 + 3GB RAM: 2339.43 s (40 min) <---WINNER by 20 minutes!

@XI AMD 64x2 + 4GB RAM: 3554.57 s (1 hr)

Same PLA file same camera and rendering settings, etc.

One thing that was curious on the Mac Pro was that during the rendering there was a max of 2 cores being used at once. It would jump between all four cores, but only 2 at once. I don't know why.

There are some inconsistencies with the number of objects that were processed so I may need to re-run a bit more precisely to be totally fair.

They didn't have any 3GHZ Mac Pros to test so I will retest when they are available.

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 21:59:22 GMT

Was that using the Beta Mac-Intel Version of AC?

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:22:12 GMT

That was with the release candidate of the MacTel version of AC 10.

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

__archiben — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:25:28 GMT

Eric wrote:
One thing that was curious on the Mac Pro was that during the rendering there was a max of 2 cores being used at once. It would jump between all four cores, but only 2 at once. I don't know why.

eric - after my benchmarking ( here ) i got a little sceptical over how efficiently - if at all - lightworks addresses a 'quad'. the local tech guys here (unrelated to archicad) told me that if an app was using dual processors there shouldn't be a problem with four. my concern is that maybe a dual core, dual processor may behave differently than simply having parallel quad processors . . . i'm not a techie so i have no idea how these things work.

additionally, i'm sceptical about graphisoft's ability to implement 3rd party technologies into archicad. maybe they stuffed up. wouldn't be the first time . . .

whatever the case, i really would like to hear graphisoft's official line on the use of 'quad' processors with archicad. we're sending back the offending quad from my benchmarking in the link above because it really isn't performing. whether we seriously consider a xeon quad now depends on whether or not all four processors will fire up during a render . . . seems not.

~/archiben

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 02:08:19 GMT

Maybe AC isn't using all four cores, but I could still fire up another session and render another scene in the same file simultaneously with Teamwork. I would expect the Mac would perform much better at this task than XP. In XP I can't even switch apps without noticable lag even with the dual core.

Have you tried doing that to see if the quad can handle it?

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

__archiben — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 02:14:13 GMT

Eric wrote:
Have you tried doing that to see if the quad can handle it?

it's already packed back up in its box . . .

i'll see if i can get down to the showroom with AC and run some test sometime soon . . .

~/archiben

Re: Mac Pro benchmarks

TomWaltz — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 12:52:03 GMT

I've not used AC10 a lot on my Quad G5, but Lightworks in AC9 really rocked on it.