Hi Efflux,
Quote from: efflux on September 03, 2007, 02:46:44 AM
I have a PowerMac G5 dual core 2.0 GHz with 2 gigs RAM. My PCs are P4 3.0 GHz 2 gigs RAM.
This is basically the same as my main work machines, except I have a dual 2.7 PowerMac G5.
QuoteHowever the OSX desktop is always a little slower than with Windows or Linux but nothing that really hampers work speed. As far as I know this is simply due to how OSX utilizes your graphics card for the desktop. It sends it to Open GL as far as I'm aware and I guess ultimately makes for better CPU usage for other tasks going on. My graphics card is a standard Geforce 6600 PCI Express.
I'm not sure that the graphics card is used as much as it could be yet, although you're right, OpenGL is used for certain things. I think this will be more widespread in OS X 10.5. I actually find my Windows machine to be a lot more sluggish than my Macs running OS X.
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However TG2 UI is slow in feedback. Specifically when doing tricky things like hooking up nodes. I find myself having to delay to make sure things are hooked with the mouse. This gets fiddly compared to on the PC.
Have you tried unchecking the "Use line smoothing" checkbox in the Network View panel of the preferences? Does that improve things? I would say that the OpenGL stuff does seem to slow down a little more quickly on the Mac as opposed to Windows. One difference is that in the Mac version I've been experimenting with higher quality text rendering, and with more complex networks the higher quality text does slow things down. I have experimented with using a cache briefly, and it did speed things up although it also stopped working after a while. I will look into it further in the near future. If you have a project which seems particularly slow I would be interested in seeing it.
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Also, when I cancel a render it takes a while to take effect, maybe 5 to 10 seconds whereas on my PC this is almost instant.
This should improve when things get threaded.
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The complexity of the planet or preview or anything has little impact on these UI speeds.
I'd expect that because these are slightly different things to what I was thinking about originally :-).
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Rendering is fine. About the speeds I'd expect for one 2.0 GHz core.
The Mac version generally seems to go pretty well. I have noticed that it seems a bit faster on an Intel Mac than a PPC one, for whatever reason.
Regards,
Jo