ss3_gokoux

It's time for something geeky! If you don't care to know, feel free to stop reading.

I ran some pretend official After Effects benchmarks, using three machines and four different configurations.

• 1.8 GHz (single processor) Power Mac G5, 2 GB RAM, 7200 rpm hard drive, After Effects 7.0
• 2.33 GHz (dual core) MacBook Pro, 2 GB RAM, 5400 rpm hard drive, After Effects 7.0.1, virtualized using Parallels Desktop 2.5 (build 3188.0) Windows XP SP2 and 1 GB RAM.
• 2.33 GHz (dual core) MacBook Pro, 2 GB RAM, 5400 rpm hard drive, After Effects CS3 beta, fully native under Mac OS X
• HP workstation, some sort of Intel Xeon dual processor with hyperthreading, 2 GB RAM, 700 GB RAID, After Effects 7.0.1

I rendered one of the animated backgrounds I finished today (that is, until the client sees and changes it), it's 600 frames long, lots of nested 3D layers, lots of large footage. Typical shit I work with.

Caveats:

• The PC's RAID has been giving me trouble lately. It's slow. Often times the normal internal boot drive is faster when copying files to/from the network (or saving 100+ MB files out of Photoshop).
• Parallels, supposedly, only runs on one processor core, regardless of the actual number of cores. MenuMeters never showed 100% for both cores, but they both tended to fluctuate anywhere from 20%-70% usage. So I'm not sure if that's Mac OS X tossing threads back and forth between cores or what.
• The MBP never really hit 100% cpu (under Parallels nor AFX CS3), so I'm assuming the slow ass laptop hard drive was a bottleneck.
• The G5 is running AFX 7.0, I used to use 6.5 when the G5 was my main machine and haven't been keeping it up to date ever since. I don't know if the 7.0.1 update would substantially increase rendering times.

And the results are below. I finally found a use for Keynote, even though I'm not making a presentation. I was surprised by the times.


Times are in seconds. Shorter bars are better.

The G5 did... terribly. I should have spent the few extra hundred for the dual 2.0 GHz (which was top of the line back then, the one I bought was the middle). But luckily the G5 is no longer my main machine. But for an over three and a half year old machine, that's not too shabby considering it's got one processor at a slower clock speed.

I was surprised how much faster my MacBook Pro is even when virtualized on one core compared to the G5 and running gay Windows.

I really expected the fully native AFX CS3 to be faster, but after doing the math, it's just over 33% faster, which is pretty damn good work on Adobe's [and Parallels] part. Plus this is a beta version. And since the cores never hit 100% cpu, the slow hard drive definitely held back some potential speed power. Perhaps when I have a boring life again I'll do another test that is fully CPU-bound.

The PC's time I'm not really shocked by. The RAID, although slow at times, is still faster than the laptop drive. Not to mention hyperthreading fooling Windows into thinking it's a quad-processor machine which should definitely help for rendering. Plus I'm sure it uses at least twice as much electricity as the MBP, so I'm not really all that surprised that it won out here.

Anyway. That's it for the geek action. It's bedtime. Tomorrow will be a fun filled day, with me cranking out backgrounds and wanting to kill myself, and then to be followed up by a hopefully kick ass Porcupine Tree concert. And then it's back to crazy overtime hours until this is all done.

The show airs next month. So only a few more weeks of crunch time. It just sucks that I have to move during this, too.