Mac OS X 10.2.1--How Fast Is It?

We began benchmarking the speed of Mac OS X with the initial 10.0 release because the biggest complaint in addition to the lack of customary Mac OS features and OS X native applications was its speed or lack of it to be exact.

The speed of launching applications increased with version 10.0.3 and again with 10.1. Since then, applications take just a few seconds to launch and there have been virtually no changes through 10.2 and none would be expected.

What still takes a long time in Mac OS X through 10.2 is a cold boot, i.e. starting up, and launching the Classic mode. In addition, 2D graphics have been much slower in OS X than OS 9. The latter is most troubling since starting up and launching Classic mode are rare events these days. Part of the lack of speed is due to 2D graphics being processed by the CPU rather than the graphics chip (GPU) as is done in Mac OS 9 and earlier.

During his keynote at Macworld NYC 2002, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that version 10.2, code-named Jaguar, would enable Quartz Extreme, a special implementation of OpenGL drivers to offload some of the graphics processing from the CPU to the GPU to speed things up significantly. He stated, and the Jaguar web site noted, that a graphics card with at least 32 MB of video RAM would be needed to take advantage of Quartz Extreme. Basically any ATI Radeon or GeForce2 MX based graphics card or later is needed or so it was claimed. This set off a flurry of activity among Mac owners, particularly us Cube owners, to replace the aging but excellent Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pro graphics cards that have only 8 or 16 MB of video RAM. As we have noted before, the Rage 128 Pro is excellent in 2D graphics but is toasted by a Radeon or GeForce2 MX in 3D.

We noted our disappointment with Quartz Extreme in our August speed test of Jaguar. While 10.2 sure seemed snappier, our graphics benchmarks showed little improvement in our standard computer, a 450 MHz G4 Cube. We had even replaced the Rage 128 Pro graphics card with a GeForce2 MX in anticipation of better graphics speed from Quartz Extreme, seemingly in vain.

For our test runs of the 10.2.1 update we decided to see how much better our 450 MHz Cube did with the 32 MB GeForce2 MX than with the stock Rage 128 Pro. We were surprised. The Rage Pro scored as well or better than the Geforce2 MX on our graphics benchmarks. Here are the results using the Rage 128 Pro graphics card:

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

Action	10.0.4	10.1	10.1.5	10.2	10.2.1
Startup Chime to Login	96	68	79	56	45
Login to Desktop	20	9	19	20	10
Shutdown	-	4	5	20	9
Classic Mode	40	46	43	33	26
Netscape 4.77-4.79	4	2	3	2	-
AppleWorks 6.1-6.2.4	6	2	2	1	-
IE 5.1-5.1.4	9	2	3	3	-
OmniWeb 4.0-4.0.6	10	3	4	4	-
System Preferences	3	1	2	1	-
Scroll in Acrobat 5	69	82	71	-	47
Scroll in AppleWorks	-	-	15	11	11
Let1kWindowsBloom	-	61	57	56	53
CocoaBench Image Score	-	-	-	11	11
Speed Run Graphics Score	-	-	-	334	333

Jaguar was faster than previous versions at starting up and 10.2.1 improved the startup time even further. Login and shutdown, slower in Jaguar, are twice as fast in 10.2.1.

Launching Classic mode is even faster in 10.2.1 than in Jaguar. We skipped repeating the other application launches which have remained very fast since 10.1.

Scrolling in Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 is one 2D video test that we have used for almost every version of OS X except Jaguar. For some reason, the scrolling arrows do not work in the mode that we use to conduct the test. Gene Steinberg pointed out to us that the page up and page down keys work for Acrobat Reader scrolling in Jaguar but our tests using the keys rather than the arrows resulted in a very slow 102 seconds, very unlikely to be consistent with previous tests using the arrows. Curiously, in 10.2.1 the arrows work intermittently. We were able to conduct the test and the time to scroll the entire Virtual PC 4.0 Manual PDF file decreased markedly from previous versions of OS X. The page down key produced the same slow scroll of 102 seconds confirming our concern for consistency using them. We suspect that Jaguar's performance in this test using the arrows would be comparable to 10.2.1 if the arrows worked.

Scrolling a 100-page document in AppleWorks was the same in 10.2.1 and 10.2, both a nice improvement over previous versions.

Let1kWindowsBloom, an application that opens and closes 1000 windows in the Finder, was slightly faster in 10.2.1.

Two other recently released OS X benchmarks, CocoaBench and Speed Run, gave virtually identical graphics scores for 10.2.1 and 10.2.

In summary, 10.2.1 speeds some things up: startup, login, shutdown and launching. There are no significant changes in our graphics benchmarks between 10.2 and 10.2.1 but they show a better improvement over previous OS X versions than our previous Jaguar test.

Curiously, the graphics benchmarks are SLOWER for the GeForce2 MX card with the 32 MB video RAM required, according to Apple, for optimum Quartz Extreme performance than for the original Rage 128 Pro. The GeForce2 MX took 15 vs 11 seconds to scroll the AppleWorks document, 73 vs 56 seconds in Let1kWindowsBloom and received a lower score (higher is better) of 238 vs 334 in Speed Run 1.1.3. We can't fully explain this but it is likely to be one reason why we did not see much of an improvement from Quartz Extreme when we originally tested Jaguar. Perhaps this means that we are yet to see the full potential of Quartz Extreme.

-- Weekend, September 21-22 --

[Update 12:30pm ET 9/22] MRJPluginCarbon 1.0.1 is available for download via MacUpdate.com. v1.0.1 adds Mac OS X 10.2 compatibility and is for use with X versions of Netscape 6 and Mozilla. [Dana Baggett]

[Update 7pm ET 9/21] iCalShare.com Opens: The number of shared calendars is proliferating like rabbits. If you use iCal, check out iCalShare.com.