Matthew Mc Clement wrote:
> 
> But more in line with this thread, I agree that photoshop is not the
> best app to compare, but there are several magazines that use it as a
> comparison. So what would be a good cross-platform benchmark? For raw
> processing speed, I guess the byte benchmarks are reasonable, anybody
> used this to compare the G3, PPC and PII?Pov might be another good
> option for FPU, but I know little about the mac architecture, and so I
> don't know what POV has been optimised for, or does each version have
> different optimization's for different platforms? But what I would love
> to see is a universal 3d benchmark, so we can see how our humble Pc's
> measure upto SGI Extreme's...;-)

Ultimately, there's NO good way to compare overall performance between two
different systems, unless you want to spend a month devising various specific
and real-world benchmarks.. and then the OS gets in the way.

Fortunately, by now we've probably seen that many Mac vs. Wintel comparisons,
and it's fairly safe to say that IN GENERAL Power Macs are significantly (but
not tremendously) faster than Pentiums.. say 20-50%.

> P.S. Does the mac have any good 3d accelerators?

Yes, but 3D acceleration won't speed up POV-Ray (or other raytracers), if
that's what you want it for. That'd be like getting a bunch of hungry
teenagers to help your food cook faster; it doesn't work that way.

On the other hand, the G4 machines should make excellent raytracers when they
come out; I don't think that AltiVec will help with all the floating math
(unfortunately), but they're supposed to have much better FPU than earlier chips...

-Xplo

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