Fastest card for DTP in OS X (NOT gaming) ?

halcyon · August 21, 2003 4:23AM

Have there been any REAL-LIFE application tests between various ATI and nVidia GPUs in how they handle graphics drawing/redrawing speed in OS X GXX/DTP apps (Photoshop, Freehand, InDesign)?

I'm interested in comparisons that show how fast a card is in OS X:

- Photoshop, Freehand, Indesign, etc draw speed

- graphical glitches or issues (if any)

- CPU usage differences when drawing on screen (if any)?

I'm NOT interested in 3D game speed, artificial benchmarks (i.e. from benchmarking apps) or GPU specification comparisons.

Does anybody know of "2D" graphics/DTP tests comparing different cards? ("2D" in quotation marks due to how Quartz Extreme works).

regards,

Halcyon

messiah · August 21, 2003 8:37AM

All good questions... this should be interesting!

mount_my_floppy · August 21, 2003 9:23AM

Yes, Good first post and welcome to AI.

These are good questions as I am interested in these Apps as well, I`ll dig around my usual sites today and see what I can bring up and post back here later on today if no one has beat me to it.

messiah · August 21, 2003 10:39AM

I'm sorry I can't be a little more scientific, but I recently swapped out the standard graphics card in an 800MHz Quicksilver for the full-on NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600, with 128MB of RAM.

I personally didn't notice any difference in OS X and InDesign. Scrolling around was still jerky, with screen redraws leaving white areas everywhere.

Xbench reported as small increase in processing power (in fact there were small increases across the board - I guess the GPU was doing it's job and freeing up the CPU), but in the real world I think you'd be pushed to tell the difference...

halcyon · August 21, 2003 12:30PM

Thanks for the comments and the welcoming

If you find any benchmarks, please do report them here.

If anybody has a chance to test even an older ATI card (say Rage 128 Pro) against a newer ATI or nVidia card with real-life apps, I'd really appreciate it.

I only have access to a single MacOS X machine right now and even that is a laptop. So I can't change cards myself

My current working hypothesis is that CPU is still very much the bottle neck in many display related tasks, even with a relatively high speed display card.

However, I wish there was at some speed benefit from the brand new GPUs.

I don't game so I can't justify the purchase of a Radeon 9800 Mac edition, unless it speeds up all grahpics related tasks in real-life considerably.

cheers,

Halcyon

wmf · August 21, 2003 9:00PM

Those are 2D apps, so you'll be fine with an original Radeon.

henriok · August 22, 2003 4:40AM

I would guess that either Radeon or geForce cards are good enough for everything you might want to do in 2D. that's why the 3D development has completely overshadowed the one for 2D. Having said that.. I still think the fastets 3D card ou there will be the best one for 2D. why?

Quartz Extreme. Mac OS X is really heavy in its UI and the more a GPU can off load the CPU from doing UI rendering the better. Using really large screens (like 2x 1600x1200) will require A LOT of VRAM for doing the compositing of Quartz Extreme.

So.. I would guess that the Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB VRAM in 8x AGP-flavour in the new G5 would be the fastest graphics card for 2D apps like PS, Ill, InD and so forth.

halcyon · August 23, 2003 7:15AM

I appreciate all the theory and am aware of them.

However, theory does not a real world application speed make.

Any Radeon up to Radeon 8500/9000 (64 Mb) I've seen is dog slow in redraws and rendering extensive graphics in OS X. Even with all the shadows/opacities/dock/candy turned off.

Isn't there any way to speed up these operations?

Something like scrolling in Photoshop, moving a full window or instructing a redraw in InDesign is painfully slow.

Hell, even moving a big Safari or Finder window causes CPU usage to jump to near 100%. That's a blit operation on other operating systems and takes less than 3% of cpu time on most operating systems.

Isn't there a way to speed this up other than waiting for 3 GHz CPUs?

Any practical tips that I could use?

Any tip on a graphic card that truly is faster than the competition in tasks like above?

altivec_2.0 · August 23, 2003 9:03AM

hmm.. I have a old iMac G3 Classic 600Mhz with a ATI 128BIt 16MB Video card. I'm running OS X and everything is smooth. When i move a window in safari my cpu only jumps to 30% and a window in photoshop with a high res picture 1600x1200 at 60MBs only jumps the cpu to 80 to 85, you must remember to i'm on a G3 and 512MB ram.

amarone · August 23, 2003 9:23AM

I don't think that today's GPUs haven't the power for such works. Apps like InDesign or Illustrator are f***ing slow, that's the real problem. Look at Quark: it's a lot faster than ID. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of ID and I too think Quark's a loser, but the perfermonce is indisputable, even running Quark 4/5 in Classic. I think it will all be much better when the new optimized versions of them are out, bundled with the power of panther.

And of course there is still the font-problem. Using much text in a document slows your layout-scrolling down a lot. So me hopes Fontbook will change this too.

amarone

leonis · August 23, 2003 11:47AM

For 2D (or some "light duty" 3D) stuff there really is no point to go for the highend video card.

The built-in card will be more than enough

smircle · August 25, 2003 9:54AM

Quote:

Originally posted by halcyon

Hell, even moving a big Safari or Finder window causes CPU usage to jump to near 100%. That's a blit operation on other operating systems and takes less than 3% of cpu time on most operating systems.

Hmm, here on my old Dell (700Mhz) laptop, moving an IE window causes the CPU usage to shoot through the roof instantly. The window even gets torn because the CPU cannot keep up.

This might not be the case with a super-modern gfx card on a 3Ghz P4, but even then, I somehow doubt the 3%.

My Ti/400 is certainly not worse than the Dell, albeit not much better either (less torn window edges).

[fs] mac_daddy · August 26, 2003 7:08AM

Yea i upgraded my stock vid card from my Dual 1.0 QS to a nVidia ti4600 and noticed no change - except in games.

[edit]

Oh yea, there was one thing... my wallet was lighter!

[/edit]

powerdoc · August 26, 2003 7:28AM

Quote:

Originally posted by halcyon

Have there been any REAL-LIFE application tests between various ATI and nVidia GPUs in how they handle graphics drawing/redrawing speed in OS X GXX/DTP apps (Photoshop, Freehand, InDesign)?

I'm interested in comparisons that show how fast a card is in OS X:

- Photoshop, Freehand, Indesign, etc draw speed

- graphical glitches or issues (if any)

- CPU usage differences when drawing on screen (if any)?

I'm NOT interested in 3D game speed, artificial benchmarks (i.e. from benchmarking apps) or GPU specification comparisons.

Does anybody know of "2D" graphics/DTP tests comparing different cards? ("2D" in quotation marks due to how Quartz Extreme works).

regards,

Halcyon

Any new card is enough for 2 D applications. There is differences in term of speed, but these differences do not interest anymore the benchmarkers.

The main difference, you will see is the quality. ATI used to be better for this one, but if my memory is correct, the lattest generation of nvidia cards are very near.

shallowthroat · August 27, 2003 2:14PM

I just bought a new ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Mac card, and i do a fair bit of PS work (albeit also a fair bit of gaming), so i will let you know what the 2D Preformance is like after i throw this bad boy in.

maybe ill even do some benchmarks now...

-ST

halcyon · September 2, 2003 10:08AM

ShallowThroat,

have you had time to try out your R9800?

Any comments? Even subjective measures of speed differences, if any?

Thanks!

ryaxnb · September 2, 2003 11:06AM

No offense, but you're talking about moving windows? It's one of the things OS X does great - even on my 900Mhz iBook! Moving very rarely shows noticable slowdown, even going as fast as I can. Indeed the only problem I can tell with moving fast is that the LCD can't keep up, it works so well!

halcyon · September 4, 2003 12:28PM

ryaxnb,

you should look at the CPU utilisation rate when you move windows.

Not a pretty sight.

Yes, it's fast on a 900Mhz CPU, but it should not take 80% + of the CPU time like it does.

I can even crash the latest Panter build Finder just by moving and resizing finder windows for 30 secs.

That's why I'm looking for more speed with less cpu hit.

alfrank · September 4, 2003 12:53PM

Quote:

Originally posted by halcyon

ryaxnb,

you should look at the CPU utilisation rate when you move windows.

Not a pretty sight.

Yes, it's fast on a 900Mhz CPU, but it should not take 80% + of the CPU time like it does.

I can even crash the latest Panter build Finder just by moving and resizing finder windows for 30 secs.

That's why I'm looking for more speed with less cpu hit.

I just tested it on my G4 Dual 450 with an ATI Radeon 8500 AGP with 64 MB:

No more than 20% CPU utilisation when moving Finder windows !

ATI is well known for good 2D performance since their first VGA cards nearly 15 years ago ! And also for high picture/signal quality !

Alex.

dcullipher · September 4, 2003 1:28PM

Just to note on the CPU utilization and moving windows on the PC.

I have an AMD 1800 512M 2100 DDR Stupid ATI Rage card at work and a AMD 2500+ Barton 3200 DDR Geforce4Ti 4400 128M at home. Both running Win2k. And both will use 100% CPU instantly when moving windows around fast. Same on a PII 450.

I think it is how the OS works. It gives #1 CPU priority to moving windows.

So I wouldn't use this as a performance measure. However opening a 200M+ photoshop file zoom in and drag around and see if you get many redraws. This is a due to CPU and video card performance I think.

nemesis · September 4, 2003 3:45PM

ATI makes the best graphics cards hands down. My ATI Rage 128 has NO sanfus no ugly redraws. This is a 400 mhz g4 w/ agp graphics. I love ATI thats why i bought the current 15in pb it is the only pb w/ ati ...the other are nvidea crap.

Fastest card for DTP in OS X (NOT gaming) ?

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