Adobe has a new ” PC Preferred ” site promoting a speed test in the July 2002 issue of Digital Producer Magazine, in which a Wintel system beat a Mac.
The showdown pitted a single-processor Dell 2.53GHz Pentium 4, the Dell Precision Workstation 340, and a 1.25GHz dual-processor Power Mac G4 (the fastest Mac then available). The contest compared renderings of files created in Adobe After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop software.
“While the computers used in this study are no longer the fastest in their respective classes, the information is still valid,” a note on the Adobe site reads. “The PC outperformed the similar Macintosh machine, at an impressive rate.”
Apple has long touted the Mac’s superior performance in performing Photoshop operations. In describing its Power Mac 1.42GHz system, Apple says that it’s “32 percent faster than the fastest PC on the market with a 3GHz Pentium 4 processor” when “using nine commonly used actions and filters that stress overall system performance — including processor, memory, system bus and hard drive — in Photoshop.”