rendering benchmarks - mactel vs PPC . . .

[__archiben]

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

[Anonymous]

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.

[__archiben]

~/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

[Anonymous]

~/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).

[Anonymous]

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.

[Thomas Holm]

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.

[__archiben]

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

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

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

[__archiben]

Adalbert wrote:
Is this so only 10'12"

it is indeed so. mactel is good!

~/archiben