First impression: running Director on Intel iMac
A few weeks back I got to play with Shockwave on one of the new Intel iMacs running under Rosetta. It had a rather snappy feel, and for the content I typically create it was more than adequate.
The downside was that the screen had a rather large defect near the bottom, so it immediately got sent back to Apple for a new one. Eventually it made it back. Today I confirmed that once again the Shockwave is snappy. Then I decided to take a shot at seeing how Director felt.
One word: SLOW. I didn’t get to play with it for very long. Basic tasks such as dragging sprite around, editing scripts, naming members, etc. seemed to run at a decent pace, but hitting the play button to test the movie was really painful. It would typically sit there for about 3 seconds before doing much in a movie that had nothing in it other than a text member and a go to the frame statement in it.
In defense of Director I will point out that the iMac I was using only had the base 512 meg of RAM. Director has always been a bit RAM hungry (as are most all multimedia tools), and combine that with OSX 10.4 itself and Rosetta and it makes sense that the poor iMac would feel pain. I think I also had Safari (in Rosetta) running in the background.
If I get a chance I’ll try to watch RAM usage next time I boot up Director on it. Right now it is primarily a testing machine for the content I work on. It would also be nice to see how it would do if the RAM was maxed out.
I’ll probably be buying a new iMac for home in the near future, but will get the full RAM. I’ll let you know how that goes when I finally get my taxes done to see if I get the new computer this year. No matter what, I’ll then be living with Director in Rosetta at home.
For additional info, here is another story from Developer Dispatch on the new Intel Macs that got posted earlier today.
4 comments March 8th, 2006