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barefeats posts

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Macbook Pro, MacBook Air

MBP vs. MBA benchmarking showdown

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Apr 21st, 2008


Bare Feats continues to pit Macs against each other in a no-holds-barred, up-against-the-wall benchmarking breakdown, and this time around it's the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air in the octagon together. And things go about as planned -- while the solid state drive in the MBA has its advantages, the processor and GPU (what little there is of it) in the MBA don't even really compare to the MBP. Sure, it's a small, super thin, super portable computer, but not only are you paying in cash for the portability, you're paying in performance, too.

This doesn't mean the MBA is a bad computer at all -- for most tasks, it'll work just fine. But complicated 3D graphics (both Halo and Unreal Tournament 2004 were tested) will be almost unplayable in games, and there will be a substantial wait, sometimes up to minutes more, for certain processor intensive tasks. If speed is a high priority (at least higher than portability), the MBA isn't for you.

I would like to see how the MacBook compares, though. It's not surprising that the MBP is a fast machine, but where does the MBA line up compared to the cheaper model?

[Via IMG]

Tags: barefeats, benchmarks, cpu, gpu, graphics, intensive, macbook-air, macbook-pro, tests, timing

Filed under: Hardware

Someone finally tests Adobe apps on Rosetta vs. PPC

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Apr 13th, 2006


Bare Feats has been busy with their Mac OS X vs XP tests earlier today and now this. From what I can tell, they are probably the first site to post some benchmarks of non-Intel native Adobe apps, specifically Photoshop CS2 and After Effects 7.0. Check out the machines they used, and note the equality of RAM:
  • MacBook Pro CD/2.0 -- Apple Intel MacBook Pro with 2.0GHz Core Duo and 2GB of memory
  • PowerMac G5/2.0 -- Apple Dual Single-Core G5/2.0GHz Power Mac with 2GB of memory
  • PowerBook G4/1.67 -- Apple PowerBook G4/1.67GHz with 2GB of memory
Not surprisingly, the PowerMac swept the floor with the MacBook Pro, but to my delight: the PowerBook didn't perform that much better. In fact, in the After Effects render test, the MacBook actually beat out the PowerBook.

The SP (Single Processor) Actions test is where you can really see the performance void of Rosetta apps on the MacBook Pro, as the PowerMac and PowerBook clearly are going home with the prom queen.

Still, I'm glad to see that the MacBook Pro will perform more or less like my PowerBook G4 when running these pro apps, especially since I'm living in After Effects these days. Unfortunately, I now must curse Bare Feats for ever performing these tests, as they got my 'hmm, maybe I could upgrade' gears grinding again. Thanks guys.

Tags: 7.0, AE, After Effects, AfterEffects, Bare Feats, BareFeats, benchmark, benchmarks, CS2, Intel, MacBook Pro, MacbookPro, Photoshop, Universal Binary, UniversalBinary

Filed under: Hardware, OS

OS X vs XP on a MacBook Pro

by Scott McNulty (RSS feed) on Apr 13th, 2006


The good folks at Bare Feats love them some benchmarking, so I am surprised it took them so long to compare the performance of Windows XP versus OS X on a MacBook Pro. They took a look at how applications that are available on both OSs (and are Universal) ran on the MacBook Pro.

The results? XP wins when running games (for the most part) while everything else goes to OS X. They did compare some apps running in Rosetta to the same apps running natively on XP, and XP blew OS X out of the water, as shown by the graph above (of course OS X running on a PowerPC would also blow Rosetta out of the water).

[via Paul Thurrot's Internet Nexus]

Tags: barefeats, os x, OsX, tiger, windows, windows xp, WindowsXp

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