MacIntel performance

[beyond materials]

I've searched this forum without finding much direct discussion about how SA performs on a current 3.0Ghz Mac Pro. I gather from the discussions I have run across that SA 3.5 is not a universal app. Is SA (for regular brush painting) as fast as a 2.5Ghz quad G5? as a dual 2.5Ghz G5? be

[Synthetik]

Studio Artist 3.5 is not a universal binary. It runs in emulation mode on intel machines. Anything that is multi-threaded will run threaded in emulation mode on any intel machine with multiple processor cores.

For regular brush painting i find one of the original 2 GHz intel dual core imacs runs a little slower than the speed of a dual G5 tower. We also have a 3 GHz intel pro tower here and the pro tower actually smokes the dual G5 tower in the same test, running much faster than that G5 machine. This was with a test using the 'a gradient brush' preset that comes up when you first startup studio artist with a run of 400 paint strokes from the same generator start condition.

[Synthetik]

Bus speed and the performance of the graphics card factor in as much as processor speed. And since the quad G5 has 4 processors, anything that threads will split 4 ways as opposed to 2 ways on the powerbook. The quad G5 has a really fast bus so you see a lot of performance gains on that machine over a dual 2gig G5 for example. I don't have a quad G5 here so i can't compare it to a intel pro tower.