iMac vs Powerbook?

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:37 am

hambone1 wrote:Modul8 looks so much more, er, 'professional' than Arkaos VJ. I downloaded the Modul8 manual, but it's pretty sparse. I'd be interested in knowing how you guys are using it.

My partner Mike is more the video head, but we have one of the Live Tibooks outputting midi sequences to trigger Modul8. All our songs are broken into patterns and scenes so we can go anywhere in the song at any time. As we jump around, the video show follows.

We can both override the sequences and trigger video manually from our keyboards, and Mike has a whole bunch of controllers mapped to real-time modulation in Modul8 - 2D flips, luminance, keying, freeze etc...

He calls Modul8 the Ableton Live of video for OSX

cheers
paddy

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:47 am

Paddy, how good of performance is Michael getting on his TiBook with Modul8? Is the TiBook only running Module8?
i see the requirements for Modul8 are rather low, but i'm really curious as to how well a G4 500mhz powerbook would handle it.

edit: i reckon a mac mini would chew that application right up...
hmmmm, the wheels are turning in my head now.

edit2: i was too curious and downloaded the demo.
this app really rocks, and its sooo effecient. my girlfriend was looking for a good app just like this to run on her ibook during my live sets. thanks for the heads up Paddy, i think this will do the trick.

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 11:51 pm

Sch-weeeeeeet!

I gather Modul8 2.0 is pretty close too...

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 12:39 am

yea it looks like their beta is coming along nicely....
some of the 3D stuff in there looks impressive, now i dont know whether to buy 1.1 or wait for 2.0... hmmm

also, how well does it run on Michael's Tibook?

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 3:22 pm

Sorry Adam, Its hard for me to say, its his department innit? More than my jobs worth, mate, union rules.....

I certainly don't think we're having any problems with it on his 1.33GHz, I'm catching up with Mike tomorrow night so I'll ask him if he gan give you a benchmark - at what point it chokes when layering lots of FX or something. Hopefully that'll be of some use.

cheers
paddy

frahnque · Post by **frahnque** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:11 pm

AdamJay wrote:
here is an average PB 1.67ghz vs. an average iMac G5 1.6ghz. Both have 1GB Ram.
L I N K
notice how the L2 cache on the G5 runs at 1.05ghz, where as on the G4 it runs at a full speed of 1.67ghz. This is one of the equalisers that helps the PB's smaller front side bus. Also notice how much more powerful the Altivec unit in the G4 is. If Ableton supported altivec instruction, the G4 would actually be more capable than the G5, rather than slightly less as the Live 4 Performance test has shown us.

Check here:
My iMac G5 vs. the PB in quoted post... and you'll see that the cache does _not_ run in some dang lo-speed way. ;D
My guess is that the iMac test you chose to look at was on a machine that was running Processor Performance: Reduced or Automatic. Also, the iMac posted in your test did not have 1 Gb of RAM.

I think that the most important thing in the test of this kind is the Floating Point graph (wich on mine is near double that of the PB) and memory.
Yes.. i know my iMac is 1.8 GHz and the PB is 1.67 GHz so it's not entirely fair.

One also has to remeber that XBench is a _benchmark_, not some real live test. I'd actually pay more attention to the Ableton tests and so on.

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:36 pm

Hi frahnque.

i did not say that the 1.8ghz iMac had a low speed cache. I was only compairing the 1.67ghz G4 PB and the 1.6ghz iMac The 1.6ghz iMac has a 512kL2 cache speed of 1.15ghz no matter what the processor setting is. The 1.8ghz iMac G5 has a full speed L2 Cache, and i've never said otherwise. The 1.6ghz iMac G5 that i quoted was indeed running at full processor speed during the test.

i never use xbench as an end-all be-all. I look at the trends coming from results of a broad range of machines in given models that have been tested with xbench to hypothesize about performance. as far as Ableton performance between the 1.67ghz G4 and the 1.6ghz G5 iMac, they are close enough to say that if apple did indeed go with a G5 powerbook with the same lowerpowered G5 as found in the entry level iMac, the performance gains over its G4 1.67ghz realworld replacement would not be grossly noticable.

cheers.

ToLTeK · Post by **ToLTeK** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:11 pm

The bottom line is that for the money spent on Powerbook 1.67 GHz you can buy iMac G5 1.8 GHz and very fast Centrino based notebook that will run circles around both iMac and Powerbook - I know, I have both

Kind Regards

frahnque · Post by **frahnque** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 8:45 am

ToLTeK wrote:The bottom line is that for the money spent on Powerbook 1.67 GHz you can buy iMac G5 1.8 GHz and very fast Centrino based notebook that will run circles around both iMac and Powerbook - I know, I have both
Kind Regards

Speaking of that. What kinda "Centrino bassed" notebook are you using... And whilst were at that. Can i use my Ableton tracks from my iMac on a PC with minimal problems (say one without any VST or AU's)?

ToLTeK · Post by **ToLTeK** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:18 am

The one I'm using is Powernote CL-50 made by Compal (largest Notebook manufacturer in the world today) but re-badged by many suppliers. I bought one after reading reviews in SOS and Computer Music magazines. It's based around Pentium M 1.8GHz, 1GHz of Ram, ATI 9000 series video with 64MB of dedicated Ram, 60GB Hitachi 7200RPM HD, Firewire, USB2, PCMCIA, SD Card, etc, etc; The best part is that I can replace not only things like removable HD and DVD/RW, but also replace the CPU with the faster one if I want to - I can't think of any other Notebook that allows that... Performance wise it is on a par with top three in Live 4 performance test thread ie. 22-24%

Hope that helps,
Kind Regards
Oh, and BTW; Yes You can use the tracks created in MAC and vice versa including all VST's but NOT AU's of-course...