I just wanted to chime in and let everyone know that the Tiger review is up. There's a lot more I want to talk about, including a bit about AnandTech's 8th year anniversary which was this past Tuesday, but that will have to wait. I'm completely worn out so I'm stepping away from work for the night. Vinney and I are going to grab some pizza and then mindlessly game for the majority of the night.
Enjoy the weekend folks :)
Enjoy the weekend folks :)
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rock_eater - Monday, May 16, 2005 - link
...Anands blog is like a slot machine....Psychologists say that things like gambling are so addictive because they have an IRREGULAR reward system (unlike say, payout every third try, EVERY try COULD pay)
Anand tends to update in sorta random bursts, leaving us hopelessly addicted
;)
fricardo - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
Er, never mind on that last one. You just have to check "allow scripts to change images" under the Advanced JavaScript Options tab. Strange that it's not on by default. The first bullet still applies though.fricardo - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
A little off topic, but I didn't really know where to put this stuff:- The RTPE (original linked one, not the beta) hasn't worked for me for quite a few days now. The categorie links just come up with blank pages. It currently says "Pricing was last updated 4372 minutes ago" at the top of the page.
- I don't know if this is a firefox issue or what, but your rollover images don't work for me with that browser. I have to switch back to IE whenever I want to check out one of your (extremely useful) overlay shots.
Anonymous - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
no web blog update from Anand?kleinwl - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
Talking about guides. I was very favoribly impressed with the discussion on Half-Life's GPU vs. CPU frame rates. Tom's Hardware has an excellent comparision of cpus. Would Anandtech be willing to do something like their Half-Life comparison on more video cards and organize it like the CPU chart? It would be useful in figuring out if a simple GPU upgrade is going to pay off. Based on your Half-Life guide, I've already figured out that upgrading my 9600SE will not be very helpful, since I'm CPU limited with my P4 1.7GHz.Keep up the good work.
Hobbs - Friday, May 6, 2005 - link
Nice review.I installed Tiger on my Quicksilver 733 Mhz, 1.25 GB RAM. Clean install after backing up previous OS to external Firewire-HD. Except for one bug after installation was complete, everything seems to be working fine-no crashes in Safari, but occasional crashes in Word and Canvas 9.0. After registration and successful automatic transfer of files and applications from another partition, the installer asked me if I wanted to proceed to go into my account. I said yes and at this point the screen turned blue and had one arrow-but no menus or anything else. There was no feedback as to what was happening-I suspect that it had started to index. I finally did a hard reset. It now booted up fine into Tiger. Initially, I felt the OS was stuttering a bit (possibly due to indexing process). Now everything seems to be running just fine-system feels a bit snappier than Panther.
One gripe is the washed out looking icons in the tool bar of Mail application. I noticed changes to the Keychain. Ripple effect is not present in Dashboard/Konfabulator rip off (graphic card not up to snuff?). Discovering new stuff everyday.
Spotlight: The search in Classic was also very impressive (in fact I would argue even faster). In Classic we could fine tune search using specific metadata.
Another general gripe about Os X: There is a lot more arbitrary change in UI and behavior from one version to another. Consistency is good and change for change sake is not, IMHO.
This is in contrast to Classic where once you learnt to use one version, all versions were just the same with the newer versions having a few more bells and whistles.
All in all I feel Tiger is a solid upgrade: Maybe a few bugs, but I would not call it rushed. Of course, no OS is in 'completed' form when shipped. The pursuit for perfection continues endlessly (for good reason!).
Anonymous - Friday, May 6, 2005 - link
"Quicktime... very similar in quality and file size to Microsoft's WMV9"Now that's an interesting review subject, (Anand, what do you think?)... ignoring the fact that quictime is winning the standards war because if fear of Microsoft by the Movie industry.
Don't forget that quicktime is an authoring environment - not just a player.
Quicktime7 & wmv9 on PC have good performance... can't scrub through wmv... quicktime 6 looks better when scaled... quicktime 7 is incredible ....h264.
Quicktime on Mac is excellent. Wmv playback on a Mac is so bad it's unusable. Wmv9 is not supported at all. When Macs are so often the platform of choice for content creation is that wise?
Microsoft have been backing off Mac support recently - just squeezing it out a little. Office for Mac is still there and OK - but recent tests at BareFeats showed excel running faster in Virtual PC on a Mac than the native version! I've got it but never use it because it's just too slow... however, so is 'Pages', Apple's new Page layout/WP app.
Apple Software for Mac and PC:
iTunes - parity
Quicktime - parity
Bonjour - parity
Even the ageing Appleworks is almost at parity (6.2 to 6.2.9)
Microsoft Software for Mac and PC:
Office: 2004 vs 2003 (XP)
Windows Media player: 9 vs 10
Messenger: 4.0.1 vs 7
Internet Explorer: Discontinued at 5.2.3 vs 6 (soon 7)
WMA: no planned support for DRM on Macs
WMV: no support for wmv9, abysmal performance of earlier versions
There's always been a lag - but it's getting worse.
The_Necromancer - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link
Why so much focus on Macs???we need so more PC hard ware reviews.
Jon - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link
He probably didn't mention "Quicktime's new standard" substantially, Pete, because it's nothing unique to QuickTime or Apple. It's simply MPEG-4 Part 10, also known as AVC, and is a format that competes with and is very similar in quality and file size to Microsoft's WMV9 (also called VC-1). Probably the main reason why he excluded it is that QT7 will be available shortly as a free download. Freely-downloadable components (such as new versions of Windows Media Player or DirectX) usually get their own reviews, rather than much mention in the reviews of the operating systems that come with them.Glenn - Tuesday, May 3, 2005 - link
Regarding the Let1KWindowsBloom test..."It's not the best test in the world, but it is interesting that there is an order of magnitude of performance improvement of Tiger over Panther. I'm not totally convinced that this isn't a bug with the test yet however, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it just yet."
I hope by now you've read Siracusa's excellent review and in particular, the Quartz 2D Extreme section with an explanation of the technology and benchmarks.
It's unsurprising that Let1KWindowsBloom benchmark is 5-6x faster given that the GPU is doing the compositing work now...