Altivec in action

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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Alex Reynolds
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Altivec in action

Post by Alex Reynolds » Thu Jan 30, 2003 3:07 pm

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... ad&tid=152

One more piece of evidence that, when developers have an application that can take advantage of Altivec, Macs can embarass PCs in the speed department.

-Alex

Guest

Post by Guest » Thu Jan 30, 2003 7:59 pm

alex thats cool and everything but this is getting out of hand, potential live users should know that even with altivec optimization a pc will kick a macs ass when it comes to using Ableton Live. digital photo is much less important on this forum. come on man lets get over this.

jory
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Post by jory » Thu Jan 30, 2003 8:55 pm

with all due respect "Guest". Alex, and all the mac users, payed the same price for live that the PC users did. They are right to expect comparable performance. When a serious pro audio program is marketed for Mac, it is expected that it has been programmed with the altivec in mind.

I have a PC, I have a Mac, I use Live on a mac anyway because that the OS I prefer. I'm not as outraged about the altivec (yet) because I don't reallyhit performance snags that often.

But the first thing that comes out of my mouth when somebody asks me about the program I'm using at a show is " Oh this is Live, great program excellent customer support, but if you are mac user you should know that they are not seeing optimizing for G4's as a priority. Know that you will not see the same perfomace you would on a PC."

If ableton is okay with that kind of publicity that's cool. I understand that small companies need to to make choices about their programming resources and I respect that. Their priorities need not be mine. All I'm saying is that they are putting out an inferior product to the mac user. You can argue that its the hardware limitation of the Mac archectecture, its not as though optimizing for a mac is some great mystical secret. If you say a program is cross platform the developer should make a complete effort to make it work as close to equally well as possible.

Look... I don't really want to reopen this whole debate, my main point here is that Alex Reynolds has the right as a consumer and purchaser of this program to make his voice heard about what he feels is an inequity.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

Guest

Post by Guest » Thu Jan 30, 2003 11:36 pm

Jory I totaly agree man all i'm saying is that the over zealous (mac-only)
users on this site are being bias to the point of being misleading. I use both, and I was very intrested in altivec until I learned that the advantages
of having it would be negligable as far as Live is concerned. Imagine how the (mac-only) users are going to sound after live is optimized for altivec and their performance still doesn't come close to a pc. there will be a riot.
the only people i've seen on this site who put this issue into perspective are ableton, Format, and the guy Geraldo. everybody else is just promoting their cult. which i am not intrested in.

I was taken in at first, and I started chanting altivec altivec, but then I found out that it's not even going to make a diff, not to Live. and that is what we are talking about. Not photoshop, not quark express, and not some other esoteric program. everyday people are finding out just how much live can do, and its even making people turn away from their big 3 sequencer of choice. but the fact that altivec will make a difference in this program is about as true as clone aids 3 baby clones.

and much respect to you Jory

Alex Reynolds
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Post by Alex Reynolds » Fri Jan 31, 2003 1:06 am

If you know anything about DSP then you know that Live uses DSP, and if you know about Altivec, you know that DSP can be optimized to take advantage of it.

"The trick is getting programmers to take the time and effort to optimize for specific platforms. This takes time and money to write quality code, but in the era of Microsoft timeline driven products, quality software code is harder to come by." -- BWJones

Guest

Post by Guest » Fri Jan 31, 2003 2:04 am

good point alex but we can't twist apples arm and we can't twist abletons arm, now they say they will implement the optimization, but everyone knows it won't improve things much, so afterwards everyone will complain that they didn't do a good enough job, so maybe they will spend the time and quality on creating some mythilogical optimization that will be comparable to pc's. Do you know how long that will take?....forever and then some, by that point in time we will all be making tracks with software
powered telepathicaly with our minds. Apple needs to get on the ball, plain and simple.
do you realize that basicaly all of us who chose to make use of an apple computer are basicly time traveling back in time 3-5 years every time we boot up, compared to where pc's are today. it makes no sense

Alex Reynolds
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Post by Alex Reynolds » Fri Jan 31, 2003 2:45 am

I can't twist arms, but I buy the software, and I have the right to ask for features I think are important. You have the right to disagree.

Feel free to say how misleading the numbers are, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In my opinion, Live's performance under the Mac is, frankly, disappointing.

I look at what Altivec does for other audio and imaging applications and it becomes clear that Live could benefit greatly from a little extra work.

Performance needs to put on the same level of importance to the developers as glitzy new features.

Thanks,
Alex

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