November 13, 2010

Hands-On Report: Snow Leopard 10.6.5--How fast is it!

I have tracked the speed of Mac OS X from when Apple first released it as a preview through virtually all of the double point releases. Mac OS X was slug slow when first released but Apple has continuously improved its performance through 10.5.8, although it still seemed to lag Windows slightly in application launch speed and more so in downloading via the Internet. Then Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) took a big step backward, initially reducing OpenGL performance when compared with Leopard until the 10.6.3 update. When Apple released the Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 for Mac OS X 10.6.4 in August, I tested it on my 2008 2.8GHz dual quad Mac Pro and 2010 13" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, both with Nvidia graphics processors, but there was no further improvement of any consistency or significance among my tests (see this article).

In Mac OS X 10.6.5 just released Thursday, the version number of the graphics drivers changed from 1.6.18 to 1.6.24. In addition, Nvidia recently released its new 260.99 graphics drivers for Windows so I hoped for some further speed improvements because my Mac Pro has the previously fastest available Mac graphics card, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 by EVGA, and my MacBook Pro has Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics. Here are the results on both Macs using several of my standard speed tests:

2008 Mac Pro OpenGL Graphics Speed Tests (Higher is faster)
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version
10.6.5 10.6.4
   
Cinebench 11.5 OpenGL HL
22.6 22.2
Xbench 1.3 OpenGL Graphics
160 189
Halo 2.0.4 (frames/sec)
172 170
OpenGL Ext. Viewer 3.22
140 143
Red is fastest.

 

2010 MacBook Pro OpenGL Graphics Speed Tests (Higher is faster)
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version
10.6.5 10.6.4
   
Cinebench 11.5 OpenGL HL
12.4 11.2
Xbench 1.3 OpenGL Graphics
154 168
Halo 2.0.4 (frames/sec)
- -
OpenGL Ext. Viewer 3.22
118 120
Red is fastest.

The changes in speed are consistent between the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro tests, except that I do not run the game Halo on the MacBook Pro. There is a small improvement in Cinebench on both Macs and a small improvement in Halo on the Pro. But there is a small decrease in performance in Xbench and OpenGL Extensions Viewer on both Macs so the results are inconclusive.

I have ordered the newer ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card for my Mac Pro since it is just now available from Apple as a stand-alone kit. Bring on the 5870! [Bill Fox]


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