Mac OS X 10.3.8 Update--How Fast Is It? (Final)

2004–09February 16, 2005Macs Only!Reviews
Last Wednesday, Apple released Mac OS X 10.3.8, perhaps the last update to Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) before releasing Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) sometime in the first half of this year. Last Thursday, we posted an initial speed test of Mac OS X 10.3.8, along with our announcement and description of it. We have benchmarked virtually every release of Mac OS X from the original 10.0 release through 10.3.7 to keep track of the improvements in its speed, the most frequent initial complaint about Max OS X. Apple has made great strides in speeding up Mac OS X and that, along with Apple's continuous hardware improvements, have mostly eliminated any real speed concerns.

So how fast is it? To determine this we ran our usual suite of speed tests on our test-bed Macs. The speed tests are comprised of a series of "canned" benchmark applications and several so-called "real world" tests that anyone can repeat on their own Mac for comparison.

Our long-term test Mac has been a stock 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 so we began using our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with 1.5GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card in the speed tests as well.

Here are the results for the G4 Cube using Mac OS X 10.3.8 vs 10.3.7, 10.3 and 10.2.8. Other versions can be found in our previous articles:

G4 Cube Speed Tests (average* scores or secs).
Test Cube 450 MHz
Mac OS X Version:
10.2.8
10.3
10.3.7
10.3.8
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
49
48
49
48
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
92
90
91
91
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
61
42
53
52
Xbench - CPU
52
52
54
53
- Threading
34
42
42
42
- Memory
64
76
76
76
- Quartz Graphics
63
72
73
74
- OpenGL Graphics
84
81
81
80
- User Interface Graphics
60
104
104
103
- Hard Disk
66
64
52
57
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
54
44
54
54
Shutdown (sec)
7
13
15
15
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
-
-
26
24
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
131
134
153
156
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
57
55
55
55
Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec)
105
105
106
107
Export QT FQDV Movie in iMovie (sec)
35
32
34
33
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
22
21
34
36
*Average of three runs.

Apple stated that along with the bug fixes in 10.3.8 there are new ATI and Nvidia graphics drivers. Our stock G4 Cube has the original ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics card with just 16MB of video RAM. There are no apparent speed performance changes for the Cube using 10.3.8.

Here are the results for the Power Mac G5 comparing 10.3.8 with several previous versions of Mac OS X 10.3:

Power Mac G5 Speed Tests (average scores or secs).
Test Dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5
Mac OS X Version:
10.3.5
10.3.6
10.3.7
10.3.8
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)
12.7
12.7
12.7
12.7
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
647
646
644
646
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
1569
1587
1579
1574
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
11
11
11
11
Xbench - CPU
243
242
243
242
- Threading
241
242
260
262
- Memory
340
357
335
327
- Quartz Graphics
300
300
342
346
- OpenGL Graphics
209
195
178
198
- User Interface Graphics
374
367
410
410
- Hard Disk
110
109
108
108
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
45
38
38
39
Shutdown (sec)
9
9
9
11
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
9
9
9
9
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
62
58
56
62
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
13
13
12
11
Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec)
54
53
54
54
Export QT FQDV Movie in iMovie (sec)
20
19
19
19
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
417
409
407
416
Halo 1.0.5.3/1.5/1.5.1 (frames/sec)
57*
58*/63**
63**/61***
63***
Call of Duty 1.4 (frames/sec)
n/a
84
84
85
*Halo 1.0.5.3 with ATI Pixel and Vertex Shaders.
**Halo 1.5 with Advanced Shaders.
***Halo 1.5.1 with Advanced Shaders.

For the latest Power Mac G5, the only performance improvement among the benchmark applications using the Mac OS X 10.3.8 update is in Xbench's OpenGL graphics test. This improvement may be due to updating the Nvidia 6800 graphics driver which caused a performance hit in 10.3.7. Last Thursday we noted that our 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook G4 which uses ATI graphics exhibited a similar speed improvement. On the other hand, the Cinebench 2003 OpenGL hardware lighting test did not show a change in performance. All three OpenGL-based 3D game applications (Quake, Halo and Call of Duty) showed a very small increase in performance, although this could be due to chance since the differences are so small.

Like most previous Panther releases, 10.3.8 provides no obvious across the board speed improvements. Applications using OpenGL may show a small performance improvement.


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