pathetic g4 performance !!

Gill Bates · 03-22-2004, 06:58 AM

i just got a g4 powerbook 1.25 ghz and have noticed thats its performance is awful

i have benched it with 2 of my fav applications, mplayer and flash.
mplayer runs almost twice as slow for ripping, and uses over 55% cpu resources while playing movies, flash player frame rates drop considerably, the machine i compared against is an AMD athlon xp 1.3 ghz.
what gives anyone? 10.3 the culprit or just the hardware got to much hype?

not so sure about buying a g5 now over an operton now

frieza · 03-22-2004, 09:50 AM

dunno, y don't you try installing yellowdog linux on it? my G3 powerbook runs swell with yellowdog. There is also i think slackintosh for the slacker at heart and i don't know about gentoo for PPC, but i've been content with yellowdog, which is a RedHat based distro for PPC.

witeshark · 03-22-2004, 01:18 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gill Bates
i just got a g4 powerbook 1.25 ghz and have noticed thats its performance is awful
what gives anyone? 10.3 the culprit or just the hardware got to much hype? <snip>
not so sure about buying a g5 now over an operton now

You didn't get enough RAM. Thats all it is. Upgrade the RAM -- you'll be amazed.

Gill Bates · 03-22-2004, 03:04 PM

512 not enough ram? that doesnt sound right

Baldorg · 03-22-2004, 05:34 PM

Geez, I wonder what causes this.

Pauli · 03-22-2004, 06:28 PM

This from teh guy who has an 833mhz? get bent, go troll elsewhere.

Gill Bates · 03-22-2004, 08:02 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by frieza
dunno, y don't you try installing yellowdog linux on it? my G3 powerbook runs swell with yellowdog. There is also i think slackintosh for the slacker at heart and i don't know about gentoo for PPC, but i've been content with yellowdog, which is a RedHat based distro for PPC.

i like unix better than i like linux

Gill Bates · 03-22-2004, 08:03 PM

@witeshark
have u installed mplayer on your system?

i read that panther disables the l2 cache on 1 web site, but nobody seems to know anything about this, u know any details ?

witeshark · 03-22-2004, 08:27 PM

Why would you use Mplayer when Mac comes with Quicktime?

Gill Bates · 03-23-2004, 03:47 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by witeshark
Why would you use Mplayer when Mac comes with Quicktime?

because mplayer is better

and comes with mencoder

Gill Bates · 03-24-2004, 07:06 AM

i recompiled mencoder and got 30 fps when encoding a movie with mencoder which is a little better than the 1500+ AMDXP (1.3ghz) & is the kind of performance i was hopping to get

ilikejam · 03-25-2004, 01:46 PM

Are you using your powerbook just on battery? Apple use a pretty extreme processor throttle to save power (they do on iBooks, anyway). If that's the problem, then plugging you machine in should sort that out. You might want to check the control panels anyway.

Dave

Edit: Sorry, didn't read the last post.

Gill Bates · 03-25-2004, 02:03 PM

i was running it off the mains anyways

kdepa · 03-27-2004, 12:15 AM

Wow...thats odd. I just have a 700mhz G4 with OSX Panther and i have no troubles whatsoever. Try running the apple permission fix utility. That may help.

simsjr · 04-25-2004, 05:35 AM

Actually folks, the truth is that Flash player has always run poorly on Macs. Even if you're a Mac user and you think you're not having problems with your browser's flash player, I can assure you that you're not seeing the flash work as it was meant to be displayed.

As a flash designer, I can tell you this. I cannot, however, tell you why Macromedia hasn't bothered to fix it. Maybe the problem will be solved in Flash Player 8. It really is aggravating.

I heard it has something to do with fps (frames per second) settings when a designer publishes a flash document to SWF format. Like it has to be 31 fps or it won't display right on the Mac platform. Just a bug. Seems like it would be easy to fix.

The ball's in Macromedia's court.