hamburg wrote:
> 
> Yeah.  Although if you read the fine print in the veritest pdf, it becomes
> clear that they rather lied about some of that.  Used lousy compilers for
> the competition, disabled their hyperthreading, etc.  Used a fast but
> memory-inefficient malloc library for their own tests.  Used compiler flags
> that aren't useful in realworld apps.  If you compare to, say, Dell's
> benchmarks of their own systems (which are probably similarly deceptive),
> Apple's are competitive but not the best.

Have you been reading that haxial page? Tsk.

They used GCC for both machines. Granted, this isn't technically "the 
same compiler" as the backend will differ across platforms, but given 
that it's been optimized for Intel processors and that it sees use in 
the real world, I hardly think they "crippled" the PC.

Hyperthreading was turned off because it actually reduced the PC's SPEC 
scores. Another common complaint, which is that SSE2 was disabled, was 
false; it was in fact enabled.

The malloc library was one which would only work with single-threaded 
apps.. but as SPEC was such an app, it seems logical to use it. The 
hardware tweaks they made to the Mac were done to disable one processor 
(since it wouldn't be used anyway) and to reflect how the machines would 
perform when shipped. Or so Apple claims, anyway.

I don't know how Apple LIED about the scores, given that all the details 
are freely available to the public in Veritest's report. The most you 
could really say is that they spun the results.. and everyone does that.

> Also remember that POV is single threaded, so you won't benefit from
> multiple processors.

POV itself won't see much benefit, but being able to use your machine 
almost like normal while a render runs full steam in the background is 
nice. Try it sometime.

FWIW, I think the memory bandwidth and the good FP performance should 
make the G5 a good POV-Ray machine for the price.. although if that's 
all you want it for, you could almost certainly build a bare-bones speed 
demon PC for cheaper.

-Xplo

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