Hands-On Report: Mac OS X 10.2 Part 3--How Fast Is It?

On Friday we posted our Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) installation hands-on report. We posted our hands-on report on some nice new features in Jaguar on Saturday. Today, we report on 10.2's performance.

We began benchmarking OS X with 10.0, the first release, in March of 2001 because the main complaint about OS X aside from the initial lack of features and capabilities was its speed, actually the lack of it. We ran the same tests on version 10.2 that we ran on previous versions of Mac OS X (e.g. see 10.1.5).

All tests were done as before with AppleTalk off and network ports closed. Each action was timed for three iterations and the average was rounded to the nearest second. Our test platform has been a 450 MHz G4 Cube but this time with an NVIDIA Geforce2 MX graphics card to take advantage of 10.2's Quartz Extreme. We've used a few simple operations to illustrate the speed of Mac OS X because there wasn't (and still isn't) anything very sophisticated for OS X speed tests like there are for Mac OS 9. We ran into problems with Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 (i.e. the scroll bar not working in 10.2) so we added a scroll test with a 100 page document in AppleWorks. We also ran the same time tests on a 500 MHz iBook (Dual USB) running Mac OS X 10.1.5 and 10.2 for comparison. Here are the results:

Mac OS X Actions on a 450 MHz G4 Cube
(Average Times in Full Seconds)

Action	10.0	10.0.4	10.1	10.1.5	10.2
Startup Chime to Login	-	96	68	79	56
Login to Desktop	-	20	9	19	20
Shutdown	-	-	4	5	20
Classic Mode	-	40	46	43	33
Netscape 4.77-4.79	7	4	2	3	2
AppleWorks 6.1-6.2.4	-	6	2	2	1
IE 5.1-5.1.4	9	9	2	3	3
OmniWeb 4.0-4.0.6	14	10	3	4	4
System Preferences	3	3	1	2	1
Scroll in Acrobat 5	-	69	82	71	-
Scroll in AppleWorks	-	-	-	15	15
Let1kWindowsBloom	-	-	61	57	73

Mac OS X Actions on a 500 MHz G3 iBook (Dual USB)
(Average Times in Full Seconds)

Action	10.1.5	10.2
Startup Chime to Login	91	72
Login to Desktop	55	27
Shutdown	7	26
Classic Mode	111	59
Netscape 4.77-4.79	3	3
AppleWorks 6.1-6.2.4	2	3
IE 5.1-5.1.4	4	4
OmniWeb 4.0-4.0.6	6	5
System Preferences	2	2
Scroll in Acrobat 5	100	-
Scroll in AppleWorks	33	31
Let1kWindowsBloom	92	89

The time between the startup chime and the appearance of the login window has been substantially reduced. Curiously, the time from login to a complete desktop remained the same for the Cube but halved for the iBook. The other major speed increase is in launching Classic Mode. Application launch times, whether Classic, Carbon or Cocoa, remained about the same, only a few seconds.

Subjectively, 10.2 seems faster and crisper in everyday use on all computers that we have used it but that isn't evident in the scrolling and windowing benchmarks. There's a slight improvement for the iBook, which doesn't have graphics that make use of 10.2's Quartz Extreme. For the Cube, scrolling time doesn't change but the windowing benchmark (opening and closing 1000 windows) greatly increased even though the Cube has a graphics card that makes use of Quartz Extreme. We can't explain this. The utility, Quartz Extreme Check 1.1, indicates that the Cube's graphics are indeed accelerated by Quartz Extreme.

We ran the scrolling and windowing benchmarks on our other 450 MHz Cube and our flat panel iMac 800 MHz G4. The second Cube has a hot NVIDIA GeForce3 graphics card, the performance of which is only exceeded by the new GeForce4 Titanium. The iMac has GeForce2 MX graphics. Both are Quartz Extreme capable. Here are the results:

Time in Seconds Running 10.1.5/10.2

Action	Cube	iMac
Scroll in AppleWorks	15/12	12/14
Let1kWindowsBloom	54/57	46/48

Performance under 10.2 increased slightly for scrolling by the second Cube with a GeForce3 card but decreased slightly for windowing. Performance decreased for both actions with the new iMac 800 MHz G4.

While we think Mac OS X 10.2 is generally terrific and it is measurably faster than Mac OS X 10.1.5 in some aspects, we are disappointed in Quartz Extreme. We were expecting a significant and measurable performance boost in 2D graphics. The benchmarks may not capture the true speed boost of Quartz Extreme but the boost even subjectively, in our view, is not a lot and falls far short of the expectation created by the "Extreme" moniker. We can only hope that the special OpenGL drivers of Quartz Extreme will improve with future versions of Mac OS X.

Next we will provide our hands-on feedback from running the new applications in Jaguar through their paces.

-- Weekend, August 24-25 --

[Update 8/25 12:30p] Review--Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" in the Washington Post Sunday Business section in Rob Pegoraro's Fast Forward column.

[Update 8/24 3:30p] A New Mozilla 1.1fc has been posted on this web page with Saturday's date August 24th. Mozilla is the open source web browser based on Netscape. [Tony Wight]

[Update 8/24 9a] Apple Backup 1.2 is Out: It is the backup utility for .mac subscribers. Version 1.2 is currently only for Jaguar, Mac OS X 10.2, but a 1.2 will be available for 10.1.x soon according to the Apple web site.

[Update 8/24 9a] Apple's "100 Minutes of Jaguar" a Success according to accounts that we've seen. Hundreds of people lined up at many Apple Stores across the nation and 1000's were claimed for the NYC Soho store. Many were buying new Macs since there was a 10 per cent discount on anything for buying a copy of Mac OS X 10.2, Jaguar. Apple resellers also reported the promotion was a success. We wonder how many local TV stations carried the event on the 11pm news.

[Updated] Hands-On Report: Mac OS X 10.2 Part 2--Niceties & New Preferences. Yesterday, we reported on installing 10.2. Today we are reporting on the new features, other than new applications, that we found in Mac OS X 10.2.