Aperture 3 Review and GFX issues on MBP 13″
by admin
In my initial review I used an "oldish" 2007 MBP which, as I realise, might have been causing some of the described display and performance issues due to slower hardware etc. However, keep in mind that a) Lightroom runs like a breeze on the same machine, and b) that this MBP though 3 years old should theoretically be capable of quite advance display performance. Having said that, I decided to try Aperture 3 on a 2009 Aluminium MacBook 5.1 (which has since been renamed to MacBook Pro), running a 2Ghz Core Duo Chip and the Nvidia GeForce 9400M (256 VRam) graphics card.
Importing the 47 Nikon NEF Raw files was much! faster and the import complete window popped up after less than a minute. Again running some basic adjustment like levels, changing basic settings like WB and contrast and adjusting saturation etc worked pretty well. I say pretty well, because I still feel Aperture responds rather slowly even for these simple adjustments. But let’s not be too critical … I then just openened the adjustement panel and started adding some of the options that are hidden from the set-up layout. (vignetting, levels sharpening etc. just the standard stuff one would use.) So just adding them to the tools palette – not actually working with them – Aperture 3 crashed.
Well, and it didn’t really get any better. I restarted the software and tried to play around with skin-smoothing, which for me is the highlight of the new version. The results were similar graphic card GFX issues when zooming in or out, very slow response when changing sliders, spinning color wheel of death, often having to wait 10 – 20 seconds before even just the brush size was changed, or a brush stroke displayed.
Quite disappointing again, and as I have to say unfortunately, in my short experience Aperture 3 was not any better than Aperture 1 or 2 in terms of performance – in fact probably slower for most of it.
Summarising, even on a pretty new machine, the system is slow and has performance issues that, imho, would prevent any effective workflow. However I need to add, that Aperture performed a lot better on the new machine, though in reality is still slow and unreliable especially when changing settings in a faster (or normal working speed) pace. And as a final note, I should add, that at the point when Aperture starts to really slow down, the whole system goes slow with it, it affects Finder and responsiveness of other running applications.
I should add that it appears that though the GFX issues are not that commonly encountered by other testers (at least I haven’t seen any reviews on that yet) the slowness of Aperture is experienced by others, too: http://scudamor.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/aperture-3-review/
Thus endeths my Aperture 3 review. I was hoping and looking forward to write something more positive, but these seem to be the facts.
However, I am happy to report that Apple contacted me very quickly after posting the initial review, and they are trying to reproduce the errors described. This to me really shows a few things: Apple is on the forefront in responding to these issue. They understand the power and value of social media and obviously are pro-actively scanning the web for any review, perhaps my twitter post helped in this regard. Apple is interested in finding solutions and take this sort of stuff seriously. They have been good communicators so far and if this all helps to make Aperture a better product, I’m happy.
