[PD] IntelMacs & PD/GEM

derek holzer derek at x-i.net
Tue Jan 17 18:05:03 CET 2006


Hi Thomas,

Thomas Kronlachner wrote:

> 2. How was the overall performance of PD/GEM on a mac in general.

As others have noted, GEM performance is generally pretty good on ther 
current Mac line, espc compaired to PDP which is heavily optimized for 
Intel processors (perhaps a benefit on the MacTel?). Although I have 
seen situations using a firewire camera where a GEM patch suddenly eats 
2-300% of the CPU it used every other time you ran it, which I suspect 
has something to do with the drivers used.

But for audio, PD on OSX performs quite poorly in my opinion. Patches 
which run quite comfortably on the same machine under Linux have 
staggering dropouts and the GUI responds quite slowly or not at all when 
doing any serious audio processing on OSX. I have tried all available 
installers as well as compiling myself (outside of the build system) to 
remedy the problem but haven't found any solution that really works. 
Perhaps using the latest Tcl/Tk packages would help, but I haven't been 
able to trick PD into compiling against those yet ;-)

All in all, I won't be using PD on OSX for any live audio work any time 
soon when performance is far superior under Linux. Perhaps others have 
different experiences, however.

d.

-- 
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 116:
"Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last 
thing on the list"




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