The Performance Edge: Faster Than A Speeding
Bullet, Or Slower Than Molasses In A Juneau Winter? - Virtual
PC Performance On The New G4 Tower Macintoshes
Monday,
April 1, 2002
Well it actually falls somewhere between these
two extremes. For the test results below we ran Virtual
PC 5.0 with Windows 2000 on each of the new Tower machines.
We gave VPC 300 MB of memory to play with, and let it show
us what it could do. Virtual PC is one of the most demanding
applications you can run on your Mac. By emulating Intel hardware,
VPC allows you to run various operating systems on your Mac
.... most notably, Windows operating systems. This, by extension,
allows you to run actual Windows programs.
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Macworld, in a recent review,
described VPC performance running on a Power Mac G4/867 as
about the same as a BM ThinkPad 600X, with a 500MHz Pentium
III processor. If that is true, then the ThinkPad 600X must
be a real slouch. Actually in processor intensive tasks, running
VPC was not too bad. The machine running the straight Mac
OS turned in from 4 to 5 times the performance of the same
machine running VPC. Scrolling, however was a different matter.
The machine running VPC was only 13-15% as fast as the same
machine running the Mac OS. To me scrolling in VPC reminding
me of using my first Mac, a Performa 6300 with a 603e PPC
processor, running at 100 MHz (shudder!)
Overall, if you average all the scores we have
where we can compare the two operating systems directly, the
Machine running VPC turned in about 22% of the performance
of the same machine when running either Mac OS X or 9. Not
too bad considering, but not too much fun either. If you need
to run light duty Windows applications you should find VPC
perfectly adequate. I did my Taxes last year on VPC running
Windows 98, using a Windows Intuit program, and the performance
was perfectly fine for doing something like that.
But if you need to run any kind of Windows program
that requires constant, significant processing power, on a
regular basis, do yourself a favor and get a real PC ... put
it in the corner where you don't have to look at it. If you
want to run PC games? ... Say hello to Juno!
Two things you'll note in the results below
1) Though VPC does run on two processors during
some of the tests on the Dual processor machine, it does not
really use those processors well. It leaves a lot of the processing
capability of the machine on the table.
2) The 800 MHz machine is again disproportionately
hurt in many of the test scores below because of its lack
of a backside cache (L3)
VPC is a great program. It has grown increasingly
sophisticated and polished over the years. While not as seamless
as Classic it is getting there. Connectix needs to continue
to work on performance .... especially scrolling performance,
which makes the program seem slower than it really is.
Difference and similarities in processor and
memory systems of each machine
Photoshop,
Gaming And More - A Further Exploration Of The
Comparative Performance Of The New Dual Gigahertz
And 933 MHz G4 Towers
"Real World" Tests
All of the tests below were timed with a stopwatch. The
times were then converted to percentages relative to the Power
Mac Dual G4/1000, which is set to 100%. For all scores, higher
numbers are better. You will find , below the graphic,the
actual times in seconds, the amount of processing power usage
and, if dual processors are present, when the application
was using both of them or only one (dual vs single).
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