One of the minor changes in FA 4 is that it reports render performance in a manner that allows you to compare the performance between CPU and GPU and between different Mac models. The app reports performance in Mips (millions of iterations per second) which is  the number of iterations per second done by the outermost loop in the Fractal flame algorithm. It measures the render time only during histogram construction, as that is the performance bottleneck in flame fractal rendering. I hope other flame fractal products report this figure in the future.

You can find the render performance in the Window > Render Status Log menu after a render to file is finished.

I have been using the Worlds Gallery fractal as the basis of comparison. I always render it at 1440 x 900 pixels at quality 3000.

There is a huge difference in render performance across different Mac models from the same model year.

A 2013 Macbook Air with 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU achieves 9.71 mips (400.61 secs to render the final image with FA 4 v 4.0.1 Yosemite 10.10.3).

A 2013 Mac Pro with upgraded twin D700 GPUs and Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz – 6 core CPU achieves 778.22 Mips (5.00 sec to renderr the final image with FA 4 v 4.0.1 Yosemite 10.10.3).

Rendering with just the CPU on the 2013 Mac Pro achieves 37.72 Mips (103.13 sec to renderr the final image with FA 4 v 4.0.1 Yosemite 10.10.3). . On this Mac Pro, the twin GPU rendering time is 20.6X faster than on its CPU.

So the Mac Pro renders  over 80X faster than the Macbook Air (same year model)!

Even using its CPUs alone, it is almost 4X faster rendering than the 2013 Macbook Air.

For single image renders, FA 4 on a 2013 Macbook Air has reasonable performance during a typical editing session.  But movie rendering will be painfully slow.

Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro is a spectacular rendering workhorse. And the price difference over 2013 Macbook Airs is very reasonable (about 3.5X higher cost for 80X rendering performance).

Note: 2015 Macbook Airs are faster than 2013 ones at the same price point – but I did not want to compare Macs across different model years.

Way to go Apple!