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The performance of the G5 represents a profound improvement over its predecessors. As I use various applications on the G5, it has a snappy feel to it that's lacking in the G4. It feels much faster, and its benchmarks show that's not just a perception but a reality (see benchmark table below). In our After Effects benchmarks, the G5 was nearly twice as fast as the fastest currently available Mac G4, soundly whipping it in every test. However, there was only one benchmark, Brian Maffitt's TotalBenchmark comp 1, where the Power Mac G5 beat the fastest PCs we've tested here, which was a disappointment given all the claims that Apple has submitted over the past year about the G5's superiority over any PC. Maybe it is superior using Apple's benchmarks, but in the real world, using actual projects in After Effects and the Maxon Cinema 4D-based Cinebench benchmarks, PCs with Opteron and Xeon chips still rule the speed derby. Even so, the G5 can hold its own against any PC now, unlike its G4 ancestors which lagged far behind PC performance.
And then, when you're determining the overall experience of actually doing work on the computer, there's the crucial matter of the operating system, and its attendant software. The user-friendly and gorgeous OS X is every bit the equivalent of Windows XP, and is on its way to becoming a fully 64-bit OS, with parts of it able to use 64-bit code already. And then, for digital video editors, there's Final Cut Pro, only available on the Mac.
Perhaps most importantly, even though Apple will never talk about unreleased products, there is a new G5 chip waiting in the wings, the 3GHz IBM PPC 970FX processor. Last June (2003) Steve Jobs promised the chip would be shipping by "next summer" -- that would be a month from now (mid-May 2004) -- but it's apparently run into difficulties. Inside sources tell Digital Media Net that the chips are running into problems with heat issues, along with IBM not being able to consistently create reliable chips running even at 2GHz, much less the Jobs-promised 3GHz. As soon as those problems are worked out, the Mac will have a fighting chance of standing at the top of the heap of computer speed. But until then, if you're running After Effects, according to our tests the Mac G5 isn't going to give you the highest performance available.
| Results in minutes: seconds Boldface indicates winner | Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz with 1GB DDR RAM | Dell Precision Workstation 350 Intel P4 3.06 GHz, 1GB PC1066 RDRAM | Boxx Technologies 3DBOXX S5s, Dual Intel Xeon 3.06, 4GB PC2100 ECC DDR RAM | Boxx Technologies 3DBOXX R4.2, Dual AMD Opteron 248 (2.21GHz), 2GB 333 ECC DDR RAM ($5728) | Alienware Roswell 3200 Extreme, Dual Intel Xeon 3.06, 2GB PC2100 ECC DDR RAM ($5586) | Apple G5, Dual 2GHz, 3GB DDR 400 SD RAM ($4398) |
| 1. After Effects: Simple Animation | :14 | :07 | :07 | :03 | :05 | :07 |
| 2. After Effects: Video Composite | 1:25 | :54 | :54 | :46 | :49 | :55 |
| 3. After Effects: Data Project | 3:47 | 2:05 | 1:32 | 1:23 | 1:30 | 1:56 |
| 4. After Effects: Gambler | :43 | :29 | :25 | :21 | :24 | :30 |
| 5. After Effects: Source Shapes | 7:06 | 4:14 | 2:52 | 2:58 | 3:02 | 3:46 |
| 6. After Effects: Virtual Set | 8:15 | 4:24 | 3:22 | 2:19 | 2:26 | 3:44 |
| CineBench 2003 Rendering Time (lower is better) | 73.3 sec. | 46.3 sec. | 45.3 sec. | 40.8 sec. | 51.2 sec. | |
| CineBench 2003 Rendering (CB-CPU score -- higher is better) | 171 | 360 | 569 | 581 | 646 | 514 |
| TotalBenchmark comp 1 | 125 sec. | 105 sec. | ||||
| TotalBenchmark comp 2 | 1441 sec. | 1626 sec. |
Please note as you read the table above that our benchmarks are centered around Adobe After Effects, now in version 6.0, because that's a commonly-used compositing program, and happens to be the most processor-hungry software any content creator is likely to use. It serves as a great way to compare one computer to another, and since it's available on Mac and PC, it serves as an excellent cross-platform benchmark as well. We run six separate, real-world comps for the core of our benchmark testing, consisting of six projects featured in the book, After Effects 5.5 Magic, a tutorial tome by New Riders Publishing. Special thanks to author Mark Christiansen and the book's editor, Nathan Moody, as well as New Riders Publishing for giving us permission to use materials from this excellent book. Included in the book is a CD with all the QuickTime, Photoshop and Illustrator files for the projects for both Macs and PCs, along with the After Effects 5.5 project files for each platform. Render settings for all the tests in this article were set at Best and rendered lossless at 720x486. In addition to those comps, we also ran CineBench 2003, which tests CPU rendering times. And we ran Brian Maffitt's TotalBenchmarks, consisting of two After Effects projects created by Maffitt which claim to test the whole system on which they run. Read more about that here: http://www.media-motion.tv/aebenchmarks.html. For a full explanation of our benchmarks and QuickTime examples of each one, click here.
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