Mac OS X 10.3.4--How Fast Is It?

1999–2004June 1, 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 10.3.4 so just how fast is it?

We ran our complete suite of speed tests on 10.3.4, 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 have used a completely stock 450-MHz G4 Cube (except for the 704 MB of RAM) for all of our speed tests of Mac OS X. We included the results from our dual 2-GHz Power Mac G5 with 1.5-GB RAM to illlustrate just how much faster Apple's fastest Mac of today is against a G4 from four years ago. The previous Mac OS X speed tests with our G5 used an after-market retail ATI RADEON 9800 Pro graphics card instead of the stock 9600 but our 9800 recently gave up the ghost.

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 10.3.4 with 10.3.3, 10.3.2, 10.3 and 10.2.8:

Speed Tests (average scores or secs).
Test Cube 450 MHz
G5 dual 2-GHz*
Mac OS X Version:
10.2.8
10.3
10.3.2
10.3.3
10.3.4
10.3.4
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal 1.1.3 (GFLOPS)
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
10.3
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
49
48
48
47
48
522
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
92
90
93
93
93
1394
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
61
42
55
42
51
34
Xbench 1.1.3 - CPU
52
52
53
53
52
193
- Threading
34
42
42
42
42
209
- Memory
64
76
76
76
74
315
- Quartz Graphics
63
72
72
72
72
276
- OpenGL Graphics
84
81
81
81
81
162
- User Interface Graphics
60
104
103
105
106
344
- Hard Disk
66
64
56
51
54
109
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)**
54
44
75/52
51
52
50
Shutdown (sec)
7
13
13
14
14
9
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
-
-
25
28
29
12
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
131
134
147
140
138
84
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
57
55
56
55
55
14
Encode MP3 in iTunes 4.5 (sec)
105
105
108
106
113
52
Export QT Movie in iMovie 3.0.3 (sec)
35
32
33
33
33
21
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
22
21
33
34
34
316
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