Quark Forums

Just thought I'd ask how users are finding quark XPress 8 for speed and if there's a lot of difference in speed between using it on a G5 or a newer Mac Pro? At work we're still on Powermac G5s with 10.5, Quark generally runs ok (leaving aside quibbles and complaints about the programme itself), though we are considering getting newer Macs at some point soon, of course the expense has to be justifiable! Has anyone noticed any significant increase in speed or efficiency using Quark 8 on a Mac Pro or is it pretty much a close tie between it and a G5 or perhaps anything that works better than it used to or worse on a newer Mac? TIA

Well, depending on what job I am on it's very speedy and that's on a 24" 2.16ghz intel core duo imac with the ram maxed out so I expect if it was loaded onto a mac pro, would be like s**t off a shovel!!!!

in other words you'd sayi t was fast then ;-) does anyone know of any benchmark tests for Quark 8 on various Macs that compare it over the different models?

I have not seen a benchmark test yet, but I am running it (8.02) on a 10.5.6 macpro 2,8 QC (2008 series) and a G5 2,3DC (last G5 series ever). To be honest: the G5 is so slow running XPress 8.02 when you have been before at the macpro, it just tells me that three years is obviously the max to run these machines. Doing magazines with 100 pages is so fast on the macpro and the software is running so "well behaved" :-) it made me forget the bad-Xpress-7-days ... if ecomic-days would be better, I would have got the current macpro as well.

I wonder if there's some issues with making the software Universal too, with everything heading to Intel now, or if there's more of a focus getting the software Intel friendly given where Macs are and have been headed for a while now. It'd be useful if some magazines did benchmarks for programmes Like Quark and InDesign on older v newer Macs like they do for Photoshop, even if it was just making PDFs of a large document for example and how long they take to process, copying an entire spread from one document to another, or moving an image intensive page from early in a document to another page in the document, something that could help people who use Quark for print design an indicator of how fast (or potential issues, like PDF processing time is) it is when they upgrade.