I stopped by the Apple store in downtown SF yesterday because we were walking around for a bit. I got a chance to play with Aperture on a G5 PowerMac with the 30 inch display. And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t that impressed. I was expecting/hoping for much improved performance, but it seemed only marginally faster than my powerbook. One of the most annoying delays is when you decide to view an image at a size that fits the current viewing area. On any reasonaly large screen these days, the size of this area is larger than the internal thumbnail that Aperture cache’s for each of its images. So it spends a lot of time generating a new thumbnail for your current display size.. which takes a long time even on the G5.
Maybe this process is more GPU limited?