Mac OS X 10.3.9 Update--How Fast Is It?

2004–09April 18, 2005Bill FoxReviews
Late Friday, Apple released Mac OS X 10.3.9, the last 10.3.x update to Panther before releasing Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on April 29. As frequent readers know, we have benchmarked virtually every release of Mac OS X from the original 10.0 release through 10.3.8 to keep track of the improvements in its speed, a major complaint initially about Max OS X. With the evolution of Mac OS X, Apple has made great strides in speeding it up. That, along with the release of Apple's Power Mac G5 and iMac G5, have mostly eliminated any significant OS speed concerns for its desktop computers. Even on the remaining G4s (i.e. PowerBooks, iBooks and Mac mini) and many legacy G4s and G3s, Mac OS X runs very well these days.

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 by following the steps that we perform.

Our long-term test Mac (since Mac OS X 10.0) has been a mostly 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 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 in the speed tests.

Here are the results for the G4 Cube using Mac OS X 10.3.9 vs 10.3.8, 10.3 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
10.3.8
10.3.9
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)
1.5
1.5
1.5
1.5
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
49
48
48
48
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
92
90
91
91
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
61
42
52
53
Xbench - CPU
52
52
53
54
- Threading
34
42
42
42
- Memory
64
76
76
76
- Quartz Graphics
63
72
74
74
- OpenGL Graphics
84
81
80
80
- User Interface Graphics
60
104
103
102
- Hard Disk
66
64
57
54
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
54
44
54
52
Shutdown (sec)
7
13
15
15
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
-
-
24
25
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
131
134
156
152
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
57
55
55
55
Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec)
105
105
107
105
Export QT FQDV Movie in iMovie (sec)
35
32
33
36
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
22
21
36
34
*Average of three runs.

There are no apparent performance improvements in Mac OS X 10.3.9 for the Cube.

Here are the results for the Power Mac G5 comparing 10.3.9 with several 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:
10.3.5
10.3.6
10.3.7
10.3.8
10.3.9
Benchmarks:
Altivec Fractal (GFLOPS)
12.7
12.7
12.7
12.7
12.9
Cinebench 2003 - Rendering
647
646
644
646
647
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
1569
1587
1579
1574
1601
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0 (sec)
11
11
11
11
11
Xbench - CPU
243
242
243
242
241
- Threading
241
242
260
262
262
- Memory
340
357
335
327
333
- Quartz Graphics
300
300
342
346
348
- OpenGL Graphics
209
195
178
198
202
- User Interface Graphics
374
367
410
410
415
- Hard Disk
110
109
108
108
106
"Real World" Tests:
Startup (sec)
45
38
38
39
40
Shutdown (sec)
9
9
9
11
10
Launch Classic Mode (sec)
9
9
9
9
10
Dup. 700 MB Folder 3600 Files (sec)
62
58
56
62
66
Scroll 142p Acrobat Reader File (sec)
13
13
12
11
11
Encode MP3 in iTunes (sec)
54
53
54
54
54
Export QT FQDV Movie in iMovie (sec)
20
19
19
19
20
Quake III Arena 1.32 (frames/sec)
417
409
407
416
411
Halo 1.0.5.3/1.5.1 (frames/sec)
57**
58**
61***
63***
63***
Call of Duty 1.4 (frames/sec)
n/a
84
84
85
85
*Average of 3 runs. **Halo 1.0.5.3 with ATI Pixel and Vertex Shaders. ***Halo 1.5.1 with Advanced Shaders.

For the latest Power Mac G5, there are also no performance improvements among the benchmark applications using the Mac OS X 10.3.9 update.

Like most previous Panther releases, 10.3.9 provides no obvious across the board speed improvements. There appears to have been a significant 2D quartz graphics improvement starting with 10.3.7 that was carried through in 10.3.9. There also appears to have been a small OpenGL 3D graphics improvement in 10.3.8 that was continued in 10.3.9.

So how about Mac OS X10.4? Will Tiger provide any speed enhancements among its 200+ improvements over Panther? Look for our "How Fast Is It?" tests following Tiger's release on April 29 to find out. [Bill Fox]



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