Benchmarks: Adobe Apps and Rosetta Emulation

Bare Feats has posted a set of benchmarks comparing two non-Universal Binary applications, Adobe's Photoshop CS2 and After Effect 7.0, running on a three different machines to gauge the true impact of Rosetta emulation. The test machines included:

- MacBook Pro 2.0GHz Core Duo with 2GB RAM
- PowerMac G5 Dual Single-Core G5 2.0GHz with 2GB RAM
- PowerBook G4 1.67GHz with 2GB RAM

In Bare Feats tests the MacBook Pro (running with Rosetta) performed almost as well as the the PPC PowerBook. In my MacBook Pro Photoshop CS2 benchmarks from March there was a more signification gap between the Intel and the PPC notebooks. Of course, the the PowerMac G5 smoked both notebooks by a factor of almost two to one.

Moral of this story: If you rely heavily on Adobe professional apps, you will NOT see a performance increase by moving to the Intel Macs. We all need to start bugging Adobe to get UB versions of Photoshop and After Effects finished for the Intel Macs. The need will be even greater when the Intel based towers are released by Apple -- which are rumored to be coming as early as September 2006.

If you're in the mood for benchmarks you should also check out Bare Feats' Mac OS X versus Windows XP Pro Boot Camp Shootout where they test how well Windows apps run compared to the same apps under Mac OS X "Tiger." (Spoiler: The Mac beat Windows on four of seven native tests and performed respectably in the rest).