Tom’s Hardware preliminary CS5 benchmarks

Tom’s Hardware is designing "tests using Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, complementing our threaded Photoshop benchmark. As you’ll see in the charts below, though, Jon’s CS4-based tests exposed some very interesting results moving from 12 threads to 16 and then to 24. So, I quickly adapted all of Jon’s tests to run in each respective app’s CS5 version to cross-check the results. What we came away with simply blew me away…

With all of that said, we have a story in the works dedicated to testing Adobe’s newest Creative Suite, where we’ll explore the effects of 64-bit operating environments, the Mercury Playback Engine, and GPU acceleration with Nvidia’s few supported graphics cards. For now, it’s fairly safe to say that professionals with multi-socket, multi-core machines will be well-served by an upgrade to CS5."

...see the rest at Benchmark Results: CS4 And Introducing Adobe’s CS5 Suite.

Update: @flockofpixels is reporting that upgrading a "8core Macpro to 24gigs ram. #Aftereffects CS5 render before upgrade - 34mins. After upgrade -11mins."

AE Mac/Windows benchmark smackdown

Kevin Schmitt is back on Creative Mac having re-run benchmarks to see which OS runs AE better with The Great After Effects Mac/Windows Smackdown: CS4 Edition. There's a some twists to running benchmarks and multi-processing in AE that may pop up in coverage of this, but really the problem is that Apple makes insanely great changes to its OS and hardware a bit often. Here's Kevin's conclusions:

"Cripes, the Mac OS X version of After Effects is absolutely smoked again, and the results are slightly worse than last time in places. Either Adobe isn't tuning After Effects on the Mac at all, or tuning the buhjeezus out of the Windows versions. Hell, even single process rendering on Vista generally spanks multiple processes on Leopard, for the love of Pete.

Vista pwnage aside, it's interesting to see how enabling multiprocessing on either platform doesn't necessarily translate to better performance. The time savings bear themselves out on longer renders, but it isn't always a slam dunk to soak up all your system resources by enabling multiprocessing. If your system is beefy enough, it may be a better bet to give AE a single process and then work on something else while the render happens.

In any event, it's clear from these tests that Vista x64 offers significant "pound-for-pound" time savings for your After Effects renders. We're still in disappointing territory for Mac users, to be sure, but I'm actually surprised this time. I figured the situation would be much improved this time around, and, well, not so much. We'll just have to see how the CS5/Snow Leopard/Windows 7 comparison goes."