It’s not exactly the clash of the titans, given the fact that the Power Mac dual 1.8GHz was the second generation Power Macs with the G5 processor made by Apple, but some benchmark results are astonishing nevertheless. I admit that my tests are nowhere objective as I’m comparing apples with pears in more than one sense—bear that in mind while reading these “benchmarks”. However, I would have thought my Power Mac is so old, the Mac Pro would easily, and under all circumstances beat the old bugger by a large margin. It didn’t.

I received the Mac Pro Quad 3GHz in mint fresh condition as a loan machine from Apple a couple of weeks ago. The machine has the ATI XT1900 graphics card inside and 2 GB RAM. When I started working with it, it struck me as a relatively slow machine, compared with the G5. It felt crispier, but not a lot faster. In the meantime, I have done some testing with the two machines, and these are the figures.

First of all: the Power Mac G5 runs hot and makes an awful lot of noise. The Mac Pro stays cool all day long, and is hardly noticeable --my ears are grateful. However, my nerves aren’t. The Mac Pro 3GHz Quad core didn’t impress a bit when it came to measuring performance. I did not use Whetstones and Drystones and all that other theoretical junk. Instead, I ran a few tests with actual applications.

QuarkXPress 7 launch times were the first. QuarkXPress 7 is installed on both machines, with Quark Print Collection and Quark Interactive Designer. Both applications are therefore identical. On the G5, QuarkXPress 7 takes 01 minutes - 24 seconds - 05 hundreds of seconds to start up (all following times are in this notation --timing was done with a HanHart Delta E 100 stopwatch). On the Mac Pro, QuarkXPress 7 started up in 00:46,98 --I’ll admit that’s a lot better.

But QuarkXPress 7 seemed to be the only application that really benefits from the Mac Pro’s “power”.

Consider the launch times of InDesign CS2 on the Power Mac and InDesign CS3 on the Mac Pro. On the Power Mac, InDesign CS2 starts in 00:19,05; on the Mac Pro InDesign CS3 starts in 00:29,06. Either the Mac Pro is sluggish, or Adobe has added so much code to CS3 that even an Intel Mac has trouble starting the program (there was no Internet connection, and I did notice CS3’s Welcome screen seemed to wait for that connection much longer than CS2).

Then I opened a Camera RAW file in Photoshop CS2 on the Power Mac, added a Levels layer and saved the lot as a layered TIFF file. I ran the same test using Photoshop CS3 on the Mac Pro. CS2 faired well with 00:04,64 --CS3 faired worse by a margin: 00:04,82.

Finally, I ran a test with Painter X. Painter X has this wonderful “Auto-Paint” feature that’s fantastic to see, but does require a lot of power. On the Power Mac G5, I aborted this test after 7 minutes sharp. The auto-paint result looked like it was almost finished, but I estimate it would have gone on for at least another 7 minutes. On the Mac Pro, I also aborted after 7 minutes! The result looked like it was in a further stage of completion, but it was not complete at all!

The clone source image was identical in both tests, and it was 23MB in size. Am I too demanding? Probably. I do know that 3D animations are a lot faster on the Mac Pro than they are on the G5. X-Plane, the flight simulator that can run on both machines, runs at much higher frame frequencies than the G5, but that’s only 3D animation. The same goes for Apple’s Motion. As soon as you’re back in the 2D world, everything seems to be just as fast (or slow; that’s a matter of preception, of course) as on an old G5.