AppleInsider StaffBenchmark tests of Windows XP Pro running on all three of the first Intel-based Macs reveal that the MacBook Pro runs Adobe Photoshop faster than other laptops originally designed for Microsoft Windows.
To spice it up a bit, they allowed all three machines to remotely access a fourth Mac system through a VNC client — effectively displaying the Mac OS X interface through a window on Windows XP systems.
"The MacBook Pro is the fastest Core Duo laptop we've tested running the Photoshop scripts. It's faster than other laptops originally designed for Windows," the team said. "This bodes very well for the performance of an Intel-accelerated OS X Photoshop, when that finally appears."
Based on existing benchmarks, the MacBook Pro beat four other non-Apple Core Duo laptops on the Photoshop test, but came in behind them on the Windows Media test. Meanwhile, the two Mac desktops "outran even blazing-fast single core systems, which typically do the Windows Media Encoder test in 10-13 minutes."
According to the report, installation of Windows XP onto the Apple systems wasn't difficult, thanks largely to detailed guides available at the OnMac. However, each of the three systems required a different version of the xom.efi file — the bootloader which lets the system choose between Windows XP and Mac OS X.
Due to a lack of video drivers for the iMac or MacBook Pro, the team did not benchmark video game performance, but they did get Ethernet, wireless networking, and the headphone jack (but not the internal speakers, iSight or the remote) working using drivers suggested by OnMac.
"Apple makes fast Windows PC," the report concluded.
Andrew Orr
Andrew O'Hara
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Charles Martin
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Marko Zivkovic
30 Comments
wow! That is very good news indeed! Let's hope the Apple version of Photoshop runs as fast as they say it will!
Sweet! I would think people who are interested in purchasing a new computer to run Windows may give the new Intel Macs a glance.
Consumers can have a system that runs OS X and Windows. I think it's a no-brainer.
While this is great news, these benchmarks are not entirely accurate as there are differences between components in the test machines. I'd love to see benchmarks with similar CPUs, RAM, HDs, GPUs, and of course fully native drivers. I'm sure these will be done eventually and if these preliminary tests say anything its that the MacBook Pro can hold its own.
Can't wait for PhotoShop to be Universal so we can compare the MacIntel version to the Windows version.
Can't wait for PhotoShop to be Universal so we can compare the MacIntel version to the Windows version.
Yeah, that's the only test of interest.
Comparing Windows apps running on a Mac to Windows apps running on a Dell makes no sense. If they have the same components, they're running the same OS and the same software, you don't need a benchmark to know that they're the same. If one has a faster chip/bus/memory/drive, then we know that machine is a faster machine by the amount that its components influence speed. What's the point? The Apple label isn't going to make the machine faster or slower.
Can't wait for PhotoShop to be Universal so we can compare the MacIntel version to the Windows version.
And of course to the PowerPC version also. So, which will win? The real test is going to be interesting as there's a switch to a completely new compiler as well as architecture.
Is CS3 going to be faster than CS2 on the G5?
Is the XCode compiled CS3 on Intel Macs going to be faster than on Windows?
Is the G5 going to be faster than Intel anyway because of AltiVec?
Worst case scenario for Apple is that CS3 is slower than Windows and slower than the G5 and that's not entirely unlikely either.