Douglas F Shearer

Blender 3D on an Apple Macbook Benchmarks

After reading a Blender benchmarking, I decided to benchmark my new Macbook to compare to the other results.

I tested my Macbook and my flatmate’s Dell PC, just to give a comparison. The specs of these was as follows:

• Dell – Intel P4 2.4Ghz HT, 512MB DDR 400. Windows XP Home SP2.
• MacBook – Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz, 512MB DDR2 667. Mac OS X 10.4.6.

For each build/machine two test were run, one with multiple threads off, and a second test with multiple threads turned on. This is a new feature which is part of the new render pipeline 2.42.

First up, the Dell running with Blender 2.42 RC 1" – One thread- 2:12. Multi threads- 2:13. (All times in M:SS format)

Next up I benchmarked the Macbook running the OS X PowerPC version of the Blender 2.42 RC1 release, requiring the use of Rosetta to translate the PowerPC instructions to Intel instructions. Times – One thread – 4:37. Multi threads- 3:22.

Lastly I benchmarked an Intel native version of Blender on the Macbook. This is a rather old build from around March. Some of the UI isn’t working as well as it could currently, with menus requiring you to hit F9 (Expose All Windows) twice to get them to render. Times – One thread- 1:37. Multi threads- 1.15.

As expected, the render times for the Intel Version were much faster than the PowerPC times. The times for the Dell were probably hindered by the fact the Windows renderer is known to be much slower than the Linux and OS X versions. I’ll try the linux version on the PC tomorrow, and Windows and Linux versions (If a live-CD exists yet) on the Macbook.

If anyone can point me in the direction of a newer Intel build, that would be greatly appreciated.

NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha Intel Build

After about 20 hours of compilation, my Mac Intel build of the NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha 3 source code is ready to go. I’m not really sure if I can distribute this build, as I think it may infringe on NeoOffice’s trademarks. If you want a copy, I ‘may’ be able to give you a copy if you ask nicely in the comments.

It certainly is faster than the PPC build running in Rosetta, and is faster than PPC Microsoft Office as well. Now is the time to encourage people to use NeoOffice over MS Office, while MS Office is behind with their Intel transition.

If you want to try building this yourself, you’ll need the XCode packages, which are downloadable from Apples developer site. You’ll need to register, but it’s free. I then followed the build instructions available on the NeoOffice site. It took about 20 hours to compile all the packages on my Macbook 2.0Ghz 512MB, but it will be faster if you have more RAM.

If you need to be on the cutting edge, and use Java 5 instead of Java 1.4, then follow the instructions documenting the required changes on the Apple Developer mailing lists.

You can get an Intel binary directly from NeoOffice, but only by paying into their early access program. Think of this as a donation. If you build your own copy, that probably means you use this software, so consider making a donation. If anyone knows about whether or not I can distribute this software, then please get back to me in the comments.

Note: When you build this on an Intel machine you get an Intel binary, when you build it on a PPC machine you get a PPC Binary. As far as I know there is no way to make a Universal Binary outside of XCode, or by using Intel’s own compilers.