Hands-On Report: Macs OSX 10.4.2--How Fast Is It?

2004–09July 26, 2005Bill FoxReviews
Two weeks ago, on July 12th, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.2 Update to Tiger and the Server edition too. As frequent readers know, we have benchmarked virtually every release of Mac OS X from the original 10.0 release through 10.4.1 to keep track of the improvements in its speed, a major complaint initially about Mac OS X. With the evolution of Mac OS X and Apple's hardware, Apple has made great strides in speeding it up. Mac OS X runs very well these days and speed enhancements have largely focussed on graphics. According to Apple, the improvements in 10.4.2 included Core Graphics, Core Image and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers so that trend continues. Curiously, Apple's new-to-Tiger Quartz 2D Extreme technology (in addition to Quartz Extreme) is still not implemented by default despite it providing a huge performance boost to the User Interface actions and Quartz Graphics benchmarks in Xbench. This remains a mystery.

So how fast is it? Did 10.4.2 speed anything up? To determine this we ran our usual suite of speed tests on our two test-bed Macs. The speed tests are composed of a series of "canned" benchmark applications and several so-called "real world" tests that anyone can repeat on their own Mac for comparison by following the steps that we perform.

Our long-term test Mac (since Mac OS X 10.0) has been a mostly-stock, year 2000-vintage 450 MHz Power Mac G4 Cube with 704MB RAM. With Mac OS X 10.3, Apple began including improvements that are aimed mainly at the G5 CPU and graphics cards with 32MB of video RAM or more (the Cube's has only 16MB) so we also began using our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with 1.5GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card, an upgrade, in the speed tests.

Here are the results for the G4 Cube using Mac OS X 10.4.2 and Mac OS X 10.4.1, 10.4 (Tiger) plus the last update of each two most recent "cat" version, i.e. 10.3.9 (Panther) and 10.2.8 (Jaguar). Other versions back to 10.0 can be found in our previous articles:

450MHz G4 Cube Speed Tests (average* scores or secs).
Test Cube 450 MHz
Mac OS X Version:
10.2.8
10.3.9
10.4
10.4.1
10.4.2
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
49
48
48
48
48
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
92
91
90
97
91
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
61
53
30
30
30
Xbench - CPU
52
54
54
53
54
- Threading
34
42
42
42
42
- Memory
64
76
77
77
79
- Quartz Graphics
63
74
73
73
77
- OpenGL Graphics
84
80
88
88
88
- User Interface Graphics
60
102
150
148
148
- Hard Disk
66
54
56
57
54
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
54
52
53
49
49
Shutdown (sec)
7
15
16
15
15
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
-
25
36
37
30
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
131
152
128
129
130
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
57
55
55
59
54
Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec)
105
105
104
104
104
Export QT FQDV Movie in iMovie (sec)
32
36
38
38
39
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
22
34
32
32
32
*Average of three runs. Green is much faster. Red is much slower.

For the most part, the significant speed improvements that arrived in Tiger were maintained again in 10.4.2. Launching Classic Mode and scrolling averaged more than 10% faster erasing an apparent slowdown in 10.4 and 10.4.1 respectively. The Quartz Graphics test in Xbench score is slightly higher. All of the rest are virtually identical.

Here are the Power Mac G5's results, with Quartz 2D Extreme manually turned on using Quartz Debug, comparing 10.4.2 with 10.4.1, 10.4 and a couple of previous versions of Mac OS X 10.3.x:

Dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 Speed Tests (average* scores or secs).
Test Dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5
Mac OS X Version:
10.3.7
10.3.9
10.4+
10.4.1+
10.4.2+
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)
12.7
12.9
12.9
12.9
12.9
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
644
647
649
646
648
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
1579
1601
1797
1801
1602
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
11
11
6
7
7
Xbench - CPU
243
241
242
241
241
- Threading
260
262
268
268
265
- Memory
335
333
385
376
371
- Quartz Graphics
342
348
525
521
507
- OpenGL Graphics
178
202
233
234
243
- User Interface Graphics
410
415
521
517
521
- Hard Disk
108
106
105
107
98
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
38
40
35
37
38
Shutdown (sec)
9
10
8
11
10
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
9
10
11
10
11
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
56
66
58
62
64
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
12
11
12
12
12
Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec)
54
54
52
52
52
Export QT FQDV Movie in iMovie (sec)
19
20
22
24
25
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
407
411
405
401
403
Halo 1.5.1/1.5.2 (frames/sec)
61**
63**
67**
67**
66***
Call of Duty 1.4 (frames/sec)
84
85
86
86
84
*Average of 3 runs. **Halo 1.5.1 with Advanced Shaders. ***Halo 1.5.2 with Advanced Shaders. +With Quartz 2D Extreme enabled.Green is much faster. Red is much slower.

For the next-to-latest top end Power Mac G5, the performance improvements of 10.4 were retained in 10.4.2 with one exception. Cinebench 2003 OpenGL Hardware Lighting is slower in 10.4.2, yielding the same score as in the 10.3.x versions of Mac OS X. Unlike in 10.4. and 10.4.1, turning Quartz 2D Extreme on or had no effect on Cinebench. However, the effect of Quartz 2D Extreme is still shown in the Xbench benchmarks of Quartz Graphics and User Interface Graphics.

Mac OS X 10.4.2, like 10.4.1, has mainly security, compatibility and stability improvements. We found no real speed improvements beyond previous versions of Mac OS X in either test computer. Unfortunately, Quartz 2D Extreme is still not enabled and it no longer speeds up Cinebench's OpenGL Hardware Lighting test as it did in 10.4 and 10.4.1.

We still have the major issues with the Tiger versions of Mail and Safari--the slow speed of backups due to Mail's new file structure and Java problems in Safari (e.g. see Edmunds.com and click on either the NEW or USED links). [Bill Fox]



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