adrianjolles

We encountered the same problem, we had a HP 450C running with Macplot. We couldn't find a reasonably cheap solution for a mixed network OS9/OSX. Microspot X-Rip only works on OS X, and it produces for our plotter very poor results (fat and fuzzy lines). Test a demo-version before buying! We now share the plotter with the built-in "printer sharing" of OSX and a printer driver from gimpprint. So we can plot only from the Macs already running under OSX. The plotter is connected to a Mac with a parallel-to-usb-converter cable.

It's a mystery to me too! The three G5s that I tested are also faster at everything, including cinebench, including opening/activating large vw-files, including all other functions I use in vw, EXCEPT scrolling vw-files with large bitmaps. Unfortunately this is a situation that we often use. We renovate old houses and scan in old plans as a base layer. Waiting 60 seconds for scrolling through a A3-plan is extremely annoying. I would be very grateful if anyone could conduct a similar test on G4 and G5 and report the result: import large bitmap-graphics (my test-file size is 30mb), zoom in close enough, hit the arrows key 10 or 15 times and measure the time for the scrolling process.

All computers were tested with their original video cards. Therefore the older G4 have other cards than the new G5. Afterwards I installed a new card in the old G4, with no change in performance as mentioned above. So the only test I haven't done yet, is to install this very same card in a G5 and run the test again. If this helps to clarify things, I'll do that tomorrow.

I tested with only vw running and of course always with the exact same file. The video card seems to have no influence at all: the tests on one of the G4 was done with the original ATI rage 128 (16mb vram) and later with a new ATI radeon 9000 card (128mb vram), with exactly the same results. I guess they are only important with rendering. It really seems to be a problem between vw and the G5 processor!

I made the test with a 8-year old PowerMac 9500 with a sonnet G3 card, 300mhz, 256mb ram, and VW 8.5: 52 seconds, that's 11 secs faster than the G5. Kevin, changing to a G5 will make scrolling slower than on a PowerMac 9500.

I made a simple test with scrolling a 30mb file with bitmap graphics on it. It takes 30 sec. on a G4 and 63 sec. on a G5. I tested 6 machines (3 each), all with more or less the same result. All running under mac os 10.3.7, vw 10.5.1. why is this?? I read in this forum, that pc is faster than mac, and that os 10.3 is extremely slow with selecting objects. But why is a G5 1.8ghz with 1.5gb ram and 64 mb vram scrolling slower than a G4 466mhz with 512mb ram and 16mb vram??