BaseCamp 3.0.1 Performance Which Intel Mac?

Denny

I'll let you know. I'm in the process of installing to my MacBooks.

Steve

I'm running on a iMac with a 2.16 Ghz Denny. It's all lightening fast once the cache is loaded. I think the RAM and GPU may have more importance over the CPU personally, especially if your looking at a mobile option. My iMac has only 2g of RAM and is running an older ATI Radeon X1600 with 128m of onboard RAM.

OK...... The answer to your question is yes. It will run reasonably well on those specs. I've installed it to both my MacBooks and have been running it on my iMac.

iMac: 3.06 GHz duo core, 4 GB 800 Mhz RAM. No issues, not as smooth or quick as MapSource 6.13.7, but we knew that. ;)

MacBook: 2.0 Ghz duo core, 2 GB 667 Mhz RAM. Noticeably slower to populate the cache when changing maps, but once done only slightly slower on multiple click zooms with the zoom tool. Slightly jerkier hand control. This could be due more to the graphics card in the (older) MacBook with 64 MB of shared memory as opposed to the GeForce 8800 with 512 MB on board RAM in the iMac.

MacBook Air: 2.13 MHz duo core, 2 GB 1067 MHz RAM, GEforce 9400 graphics card with 256 MB memory on board. I really can't see much difference between this unit and the iMac, I think, mainly because of the graphics card. Once the cache is populated it runs pretty well.

All units are running Snow Leopard and have BaseCamp configured to use the maximum disk space allowable for the cache. I'm using City Nav 2010.4 and CN Euro 2010.3, so 2D mode only. I have no idea how well the units would handle the 3D/Birdseye stuff.


I used the metro LA area for the test, maximum detail. Zooms with the zoom tool were a bit jerky, the zoom slider seemed to be much smoother. Hand tool scrolling was acceptable at anything higher (lower?) than a 1.5 km. scale with the top two units, marginal with the MacBook. At 1.5 km. or less, where the detail kicks in, the redraw time after a hand scroll is noticeable, mostly with the lesser powered Macbook.

The only time the caching operation was noticeably slow was if you went from CityNav NA to CityNav EURO maps. Not something most people do, but I'm working on 3 different trips at the same time so I move between mapsets a lot.

That's it for now. HTH

Wow Steve, great report. That's going to help me as well in the future.

Thank you very Much!!! Steve.

I know what to look for now.
I think the memory speed and Video card is the most important thing.

Cheers, Denny

I am currently running it on a Mac mini 1,83 GHz with 3GB RAM (old model) and on a MBP 2,4GHz 4GB RAM, both with Core2Duo Processors. It does run o.k. but not really well. The dedicated Graphics and slightly faster Processor does not seem to make a noticeable difference.

But Since I have seen MapSource running on a 3GHz PeeCee I am considering an Upgrade. This is really responsive and I'd like to have that speed on my mac, too. What model do you think I would need? Is an current imac 3,06GHz fast enough or do I need an i7?

as stated above SCHMADDE the pc ram and video card and specifically the video card ram will be the bottle necks in this scenario. Obviously an application that is properly optimized will help as well. I'm not sure if BaseCamp itself will utilize quad-core architecture of the i5 and i7 CPU's. I think that a simple dual-core cpu along with the best video card and as much ram as you can afford will make the biggest difference. In theory there will be no stopping the performance, you could get an 8 core Mac Pro with 16g of ram and the 4x video cards running 512m of ram each with BaseCamp loaded onto a SSD drive and I think it would run pretty good ;)

I think the current iMac with the best video card and at least 4g of ram will be sufficient. I think only the dual-core 27" has the higher video card option right now. For the money though after the upgrade I would just get the i5 27" it comes with the higher video card and for a tiny bit more your getting more CPU. Be aware though, Apple was having problems with the screens. Flickering along with yellow tinting.

I'm going to give you guys a little insight into how BaseCamp utilizes your computer's resources since I don't think we've ever clarified how some of these things work.

How does your CPU effect BaseCamp speed?

When BaseCamp renders the map we tell each processor to build a map tile, and once a tile is complete that processor begins work on the next tile. This means more processors will yield faster tile generation. For instance, an 8 core machine will build 4 times as many tiles as a dual core roughly the same amount of time.

How does the amount of RAM effect BaseCamp?

BaseCamp will devote up to 1/4 of your computer's available RAM to devote to storing built map tiles for faster cache access. The more RAM you have the larger tile cache you will have, and the larger cache the less time it takes to zoom in/out and pan around.

How does my graphics card effect BaseCamp?

BaseCamp uses your graphics card for both 2D and 3D rendering of map tiles. We have tried to keep GPU requirements low so low end Mac laptops could render the 3D map, but a nice graphics card doesn't hurt :)

How does my hard drive effect BaseCamp?

BaseCamp caches up to 5GB of built map tiles on your hard drive for faster access. Once you move a map area that is not cached in RAM we check to see if its cached on your HD. If we then find it on your HD we can skip rebuilding the tile. The faster the HD, the faster we can read map tiles. SSD would be the best, but if that is too pricey then just get the fastest HD you can.

I'm going to give you guys a little insight into how BaseCamp utilizes your computer's resources since I don't think we've ever clarified how some of these things work.

How does your CPU effect BaseCamp speed?

When BaseCamp renders the map we tell each processor to build a map tile, and once a tile is complete that processor begins work on the next tile. This means more processors will yield faster tile generation. For instance, an 8 core machine will build 4 times as many tiles as a dual core roughly the same amount of time.

How does the amount of RAM effect BaseCamp?

BaseCamp will devote up to 1/4 of your computer's available RAM to devote to storing built map tiles for faster cache access. The more RAM you have the larger tile cache you will have, and the larger cache the less time it takes to zoom in/out and pan around.

How does my graphics card effect BaseCamp?

BaseCamp uses your graphics card for both 2D and 3D rendering of map tiles. We have tried to keep GPU requirements low so low end Mac laptops could render the 3D map, but a nice graphics card doesn't hurt :)

How does my hard drive effect BaseCamp?

BaseCamp caches up to 5GB of built map tiles on your hard drive for faster access. Once you move a map area that is not cached in RAM we check to see if its cached on your HD. If we then find it on your HD we can skip rebuilding the tile. The faster the HD, the faster we can read map tiles. SSD would be the best, but if that is too pricey then just get the fastest HD you can.

Thanks for the explanation. It pretty much explains the difference I see between my 3 machines. If I understand, running BaseCamp completely solo on a lower powered machine could speed up pans and zooms by freeing up RAM?

Thanks for the explanation. It pretty much explains the difference I see between my 3 machines. If I understand, running BaseCamp completely solo on a lower powered machine could speed up pans and zooms by freeing up RAM?

It could if your other apps are using close 75% of your total RAM. I often run Activity Monitor to see how much free memory I have so I can quit other apps that take a lot of memory before I run BaseCamp. For instance, I've found that between a web browser, office software, and email software a machine with 2GB or less of RAM will be maxed out much of the time. In that case BaseCamp won't be able to keep map tiles in memory and they will be stored on your HD instead and that is very slow compared to storing them in memory.