Mac OS X 10.3.3--How Fast Is It?

1999–2004March 22, 2004Macs Only!Reviews
As background, we have benchmarked every version of Mac OS X (except 10.3.1, a quick fix) starting with 10.0 because its speed has been the source of its biggest complaint, one 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 Jaguar benchmark, all of the Jaguar versions through 10.2.8 were basically the same speedwise. Our previous speed test of Panther (10.3) in October concluded that it was much faster in some very important aspects than the last version of Jaguar, 10.2.8. Panther's latest update is 10.3.3 and it appears to include some new graphics drivers so it may be even faster. Well, just how fast is it?

We ran our complete suite of speed tests on 10.3.3, consisting of a number of "canned" benchmarks and several so-called "real world" tests. 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 Mac for comparison. We used a completely stock 450-MHz G4 Cube (except for the 704 MB of RAM) and our dual 2-GHz Power Mac G5 with 1.5-GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (retail) graphics card as test machines. 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 comparing 10.3.3, 10.3.2, 10.3 and 10.2.8:

Speed Tests (average scores or secs). Red is much* faster within each Mac comparo.
Test Cube 450 MHz
G5 dual 2-GHz
Mac OS X Version:
10.2.8
10.3
10.3.2
10.3.3
10.2.8
10.3
10.3.2
10.3.3
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS)
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
10.3
10.3
10.3
10.3
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
49
48
48
47
520
523
521
511
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
92
90
93
93
1347
1384
1295
1438
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
61
42
55
42
19
34
24
34
Xbench 1.1.3 - CPU
52
52
53
53
194
193
193
193
- Threading
34
42
42
42
205
209
209
208
- Memory
64
76
76
76
302
311
324
314
- Quartz Graphics
63
72
72
72
279
274
282
281
- OpenGL Graphics
84
81
81
81
178
179
178
192
- User Interface Graphics
60
104
103
105
215
348
343
346
- Hard Disk
66
64
56
51
110
110
106
108
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)**
54
44
75/52
51
43
45
76/48
51
Shutdown (sec)
7
13
13
14
9
7
8
9
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
-
-
25
28
16
11
11
13
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
131
134
147
140
81
90
84
87
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
57
55
56
55
14
13
14
13
Encode MP3 in iTunes 3.0.1 (sec)
105
105
108
106
51
51
52
52
Export QT Movie in iMovie 3.0.1 (sec)
35
32
33
33
24
23
23
24
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
22
21
33
34
281
291
355
364
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