Is DP8 faster on a PC than on a Mac?

[MikeInBoston]

Hi guys,

I just watched the short video on the Motu website about Chad Seiter scoring the Star Trek "Into Darkness" game. He claims that DP8 is faster on the PC platform than on an equivalent Mac. Of course, being a Mac guy, this ruffled my feathers a little.

What do you folks think? Is Windoze a faster OS than Macintosh, or are they basically equal speed-wise?

Mike

[bayswater]

Also discussed here.

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... 3&start=15

[David Polich]

Which Mac? Which PC? What hardware configuration? Which OS? Which plug-ins?
Which VI's? 32 or 64 bit?

Saying DP is faster on a PC than on a Mac - that's WAY too vague.

[dewdman42]

Interesting. I have my MBP setup for bootcamp. Does my DP8 license include windows? Maybe I'll try to do some comparisons on same hardware.

Personally I doubt we'd see a significant difference there.

[bayswater]

Which Mac? Which PC? What hardware configuration? Which OS? Which plug-ins?
Which VI's? 32 or 64 bit?

Saying DP is faster on a PC than on a Mac - that's WAY too vague.

I had the impression he was talking about some of the OS X graphics features like animation that would not be there on Windows. They might give OS X an impression of smoothness, but they probably slow things down Anyway, IIRC he said "better", not "faster". "Better" is not out of the question: if MOTU had to do a lot of new coding for WIndows, they might have improved some things over the Mac version.

[dewdman42]

windows has better coding? Hm..no I don't think so. Better? Better how? Sounds to me that he is accustomed to working on a PC and holds that opinion, or has some screaming hardware he could not afford in Apple hardware...something like that. There is nothing slower about OSX compared to windows.

It could be that some of the eye candy on the OSX desktop takes a bit more than the old windows but Windows7 has a lot of that too. Perception is at play here...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

One guy "says so" does not a fact make.

[bayswater]

Jeez, things are getting a little edgy here. Someone who has used both WIndows and OS X versions says the Windows version works better. A couple of us have asked if anyone else here who has used both versions shares that opinion.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Edgy, indeed. LOL.

[HCMarkus]

I have read a number of reports around the web of applications which function better (some a lot better!) under Windows than OSX. If you are hurtin' for CPU or GPU muscle, it might be a big deal, but if your computer is able to handle your workloads with headroom to spare, I'd say use the OS you like best.*

*The fact DP has been around on OSX a lot longer than Windows might argue in favor of OSX stability at this point.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

In Finale you hear the same claims. You also hear about "features" only available in one version or the other. What is suspect is that the claims of "better" come from the users on the "better" platform. I want to see actual benchmarks, not anecdotal 'evidence.' That's the only 'edge' I'm interested in.

[bayswater]

Maybe we'll hear from someone who has used DP on both platforms.

[dewdman42]

ok I just installed DP8 on windows using bootcamp. So its running on the same hardware. That's about as close of a direct comparison as you're gonna get.

I didn't do any kind of thorough test and I don't have time to. The first plugin scan seemed to take longer then I remember it taking on OSX, but that is not really measured. I moused around a bit and it does not feel any snappier then OSX, if anything less so, and the UI basically looks the same but I have to say that a few things like fonts are not quite as "clear" for some reason, but that could very well be related to bootcamp drivers or some cleartype setting I need to fix, not sure...

also windows puts a fat windows7 border around every wind that makes it look clunkier to me. Maybe that's configurable I don't know. The colors are not quite the same, everything looks bluer and the dark themes are not even useable. Again that could be something related to bootcamp drivers and/or could be that color temps under windows were set differently somehow, I dunno.

In any case, it looks like a fully functional DP8...I would absolutely not say it felt any snappier. The fan was going like crazy, I didn't check the CPU to see what it says. It would be interesting to try to stress test it with a lot of plugins and try to see what it can get to before hitting dropouts..then do the same with OSX, but sorry guys I don't have time to do that.

I think for a a windows user, it would work great. I think its silly to say it runs faster than OSX. However, it is true that someone could get faster hardware for less money.

[cuttime]

Dewd, thanks for your trouble. Initial results are pretty much what I'd expect. There are quite a few more comments on YouTube regarding this, but Motu TV chimes in with this quote:

"motuTV 6 hours ago
Chad uses VEP with DP8...all in one computer. 64GB of RAM. Solid state hard drives. He says he has yet to experience any performance issues."

[dewdman42]

yea I'm sure his setup is awesome, that's the point. You can have an awesome setup on either platform.