Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)--How Fast Is It?

The bottom line is that Panther is much faster in some very important aspects. And, haleluah!, Mail v1.3 included with Panther is also much, much faster. Mail's speed has been our biggest speed issue with Mac OS X.

We have benchmarked every version of Mac OS X starting with 10.0 because its speed has been one of the biggest complaints about Mac OS X that has persisted right through Jaguar's last version, 10.2.8. Apple made some progress with a couple of 10.0.x updates and with 10.1 and 10.2. But, as we noted in our last benchmark, all of the Jaguar versions through 10.2.8 were basically the same speedwise. But what about 10.3?

We ran our complete suite of speed tests on Panther, consisting of a number of "canned" benchmarks and several so-called "real world" benchmarks. They are described in detail in our G4 Cube 1.2-GHz upgrade review and are simple enough for anyone to repeat on their own Macs for comparison. We have used our 1.2-GHz upgraded G4 Cube plus a completely stock 450-MHz G4 Cube (except for the 704 MB of RAM) and our new dual 2-GHz Power Mac G5 with 1.5-GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (retail) graphics card as test beds. Each test was run three times with a cold boot in between and the average score or number of seconds computed. Here are the results:

Speed Tests (average scores or secs). Red is much* faster within each Mac comparo.

Test	Cube 450 MHz		Cube 1.2 GHz		G5 dual 2-GHz
Mac OS X Version:	10.2.8	10.3	10.2.8	10.3	10.2.8	10.3
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS)	1.5	1.5	4.2	4.2	10.3	10.3
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering	49	48	109	107	520	523
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting	92	90	619	617	1347	1384
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)	61	42	31	19	19	34
Xbench 1.1.3 - CPU	52	52	144	144	194	193
- Threading	34	42	73	104	205	209
- Memory	64	76	97	91	302	311
- Quartz Graphics	63	72	123	140	279	274
- OpenGL Graphics	84	81	119	100	178	179
- User Interface Graphics	60	104	123	202	215	348
- Hard Disk	66	64	89	90	110	110
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)	54	44	42	33	43	45
Shutdown (sec)	7	13	10	9	9	7
Launch Classic Mode (sec)	-	-	17	18	16	11
Copy 160 MB File (sec)	16	17	14	14	11	12
Copy 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)	131	134	86	92	81	90
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)	57	55	33	33	14	13
Encode MP3 in iTunes 3.0.1 (sec)	105	105	104	104	51	51
Export QT Movie in iMovie 3.0.1 (sec)	35	32	34	30	24	23
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)	22	21	66	66	281	291