Mac OS X 10.2.8--How Fast Is It?

1999–2004October 7, 2003Macs Only!Reviews
We have benchmarked every release of Mac OS X from 10.0 to 10.2.6 because of complaints, particularly in the beginning, about how slow Mac OS X seemed to be as compared with Mac OS 9.x. Apple has made great strides in speeding up Mac OS X over the releases, particularly with booting, application launches and other Finder operations, but graphics other than 3D have remained much slower than in previous Mac OS's. So we asked how fast is the latest version Mac OS X 10.2.8, especially for non-3D graphics?

To help answer the question we ran our extended speed test suite of benchmarks and so-called "real world" tests on our 1.2 GHz upgraded G4 Cube. The tests are described in detail in our review of the PowerLogix 1.2 GHz G4 CPU upgrade with the results from Mac OS X 10.2.3. We added the results from the Cinebench 2003 for rendering and OpenGL hardware lighting. Here are the results for 10.2.8 and the previous versions as averages of three tests with a fresh reboot in between:

Speed Tests (scores or secs). Green is faster.
Test 10.2.3 10.2.4
10.2.5
10.2.6
10.2.8
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS)
4.2
4.2
4.2
4.2
4.2
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
n/a
108
109
108
109
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
n/a
614
618
620
619
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
30
29
30
31
31
Skidmarks GT 3.0
120
120
120
120
120
Xbench 1.0 - CPU
134
133
139
138
141
- Threading
74
74
74
74
74
- Memory
89
90
94
92
95
- Quartz Graphics
122
123
123
124
123
- OpenGL Graphics
133
119
130
121
121
- User Interface Graphics
116
115
117
117
117
- Hard Disk
90
90
89
90
89
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
50
45
47
48
42
Shutdown (sec)
12
11
10
10
10
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
16
16
17
17
17
Copy 160 MB File (sec)
12
13
13
13
14
Copy 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
84
83
84
83
86
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
34
34
33
33
33
Encode MP3 in iTunes 3.0.1 (sec)
104
103
104
104
104
Export QT Movie in iMovie 3.0.1 (sec)
36
38
36
36
34
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
64
65
65
64
66

With one exception, there are basically no speed differences among the five most recent Mac OS X versions. Only the startup test is worth noting. 10.2.8 seems to be significantly faster loading from starting up to a complete desktop.

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