Interesting G3 vs. G4 benchmark

[John Hokanson Jr.]

So I was running Norton System Info on my iMac G3 and I found out, much to my surprise, that the system benchmarks only slightly less that a G4 at 500 Mhz in terms of CPU and FPU performance. It also slightly beats a 450 Mhz G4 cube. My iMac is running 9.2.2, and the comparison machines were supposedly running 9.0.4.

This raises an interesting question as to whether there is any benefit to running a G4 in the classic OS compared to a G3 at the same clock speed. I note that the main benefits of the G4 seems to be Altivec and SMP support. Two things designed for X to take advantage of.

Thoughts?

 

[CJ_Miller]

All depends whether or not you need those features, otherwise it is not much different from a G3. Look at the apps you use often and see if they will use Altivec or multiple processors. I use Adobe apps, and Logic Audio, and those benefit from both - even in OS 9. This is why I opted for a 550MHz G4 upgrade in my B&W, when a 900MHz G3 would have been faster for many everyday things. Also I had some apps which actually required a G4, but I don't remember which.

 

[John Hokanson Jr.]

Is the a list of Altivec capable applications that run native in Mac OS 9?

I know there were a *FEW* SMP-enabled applications like Photoshop.

I was considering upgrading from Photoshop 5.5 to 7, but I'd reconsider if it were Altivec. Plus 5.5 is really good enough I'd guess.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

7 has AltiVec acceleration as an option (for example, I still use the G5-specific version).

None of the actual classic OS cares, however. This is why, for example, you can use a 7447A with 9.2.2, but you can't with 10.0-10.3.4: those try to initialize the AltiVec portion of the G4, but only 10.3.5 and up can handle later G4s. Mac OS 9, however, treats any supported CPU essentially as a generic PPC.

The G3 is very fast at certain operations, being essentially a pumped-up 603, and it was specifically tuned for Mac OS in a way that no other chip was (i.e., IBM sat down, figured out what instructions were most heavily used in the OS, and put them in hardware). The downside is that it lacks some of the more advanced bus and caching features of the G4, but (like it superseded even fast 604es) for most consumer workloads this is irrelevant.