Hi Thomas,
Thomas Kronlachner wrote:
- 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.