Installation & update
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Mac Pro benchmarks

Anonymous
Not applicable
Anyone have benchmarks yet? I'm curious if this is the machine to beat now.
9 REPLIES 9
Anonymous
Not applicable
Anonymous
Not applicable
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.
Anonymous
Not applicable
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.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Was that using the Beta Mac-Intel Version of AC?
Anonymous
Not applicable
That was with the release candidate of the MacTel version of AC 10.
__archiben
Booster
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
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
Anonymous
Not applicable
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?
__archiben
Booster
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
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
TomWaltz
Participant
I've not used AC10 a lot on my Quad G5, but Lightworks in AC9 really rocked on it.
Tom Waltz