MAC vs PC

Ok i've been searching and haven't found any stats on MAC's encoding speed. I did however read on MAC's and PC's floating point abilities. It was said that most codecs don't use floating point because they deal with 8 pixels at a time or something similar to that. So is there a way to turn that off so you could use the floating point abilities of a mac? I have been a life long PC user and lately have been using a MAC at the school library and really like OS X. I was thinking about getting one. My PC right now is a dual processor rig that runs pretty good. However a G4 processor can do 128bit procecssing vs my current 32 bit. So I was wondering if that had any affect on encoding speed.. The 128bit vs the 32 bit. Can someone explain this to me? For instance would a 1ghz g4 powerbook with 1mb cache and 128bit architecture get much faster encoding speed than a 2 or 3 ghz PC running with 32 bit? Duck

Of course they don't benchmark things like ffmpeg, but it will give you a good idea of performance. (P4 3.06 vs dual G4 1.25)

That's pretty good stuff but did any of those test deal with streaming video which is what the MAC's are supposidly good for? And isn't encoding a video just streaming information? Duck

Rendering in Adobe Aftereffects is shown...

Does anyone here encode using a mac? Using RV9 or 3ivx? I'd like to hear how it works for you

they should do a test using discreet's cleaner video encoder since it is available on both OS's, so they should look at the average encoding fps on a certain video and compare. i am looking forward to such comparisons just to see how well 128bit is for video processing

my thoughts exactly

I have a Mac OS X g4 dual 1ghz and a 1ghz celeron pc on my desk at work. When using both of them to goto QuickTime MPEG-4 the QuickTime one flies taking about 40secs to do what the other takes about 6mins to do. But I cant help but feel the Mac Codecs are optimised far more for the Apple computers. Ill try and do a test with 3ivx and get back to you as that should be a rough fair test (even though, of course, my 1ghz celeron cant be compared exactly to a dual 1ghz g4 ;) ) -Nic

These test and benchmarks show the Mac getting its arse kicked and looking really slow :D

Seems like the reviewers in all these articles are plaugued with the same affliction as most of us: lack of funds. I mean, the recent one that compares the P4 3.06GHz doesn't pit it against the top of the line dual 1.42GHz from apple, but instead an older machine that they had(1.25). Even though we all know that MHz has nothing to do with performance when you're comparing different architectures(AMD has certainly proved this to the x86 crowd), we usually will pit the top end Athlon XP against the top of the line P4 when making comparisons. In the last article that neverlift linked to, they say their first test was with a dual 1GHz apple vs dual AMD 1800+MP's, then they decided to do an updated test, but in fact only updated the PC machine to a P4 2.53 and dual 2000+MPs. They go on to list the price that they paid for the dual 1GHz machine, vs the current price of the updated PC's. I don't think it's just me that sees mac vs. PC arguments as inherently biased, but maybe it is. I've been using both for quite a while now, and realize that they both have their place, but I've certainly never would pit my old 400MHz iMac against my XP2500+ in an encoding battle. I realize my example is extreme, but it is exactly what these articles are doing, just to a lesser degree. just thought I'd throw my 2 cents into the ring.