Tevens bij Ace's Hardware een aantal uit c't geripte benchmarks van de PIII-500 en G4-450. In Altivec geoptimaliseerde proggies blijkt de G4 een flinkt stuk vooruit te hollen, in andere gevallen is het snelheidsvoordeel van de G4 minder dramatisch:
Benchmark G4 450 (Altivec) PIII-500 Photoshop (Open File) 33 seconds 41 seconds Photoshop Blur 11 29 (3D Render) Cinema 4D 3D (No Altivec) 127 k triangles/s 92 k triangles/s Cinema 4D CPU (No Altivec) 6.01 4.84 Wow! Altivec packs some heavy punch: the blur test shows that the G450 + Altivec is about 2.36 times (!) faster than the PIII 500 with ISSE. Congratulations to the designers of Altivec.
That doesn't mean that pc's are slower than Mac's however: the other benchmarks show that the G450 is about 25-36% faster than the PIII. I don't think that is enough to beat an Athlon 700 or PIII 700, which I think should be more or less in the same price category (It is probably more like an 750). (A 450MHz PowerPC G4 system with a G4 450 1MB backside cache, 256MB SDRAM, 27GB HD and DVD-RAM, Zip drive, 10/100 Ethernet, Mac OS 9 costs 3399$!!)
And gaming performance is also nothing to write home about: the Quake 2 timedemo counted only 37.8 frames. No, IMHO Apple will have to offer higher clockspeeds and lower prices to compete with x86 PC's !
