Hands-On Report--Mac OS X 10.4.8, How Fast is It?
We ran our standard set of speed tests to test the performance of Mac OS X 10.4.8 relative to that of Mac OS X 10.4.7 using our two Intel-based Macs--a 2.16GHz 15" MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM and a 2.33GHz 24" iMac Core 2 Duo with 1GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT graphics card. The tests consist of four canned benchmark applications, four so-called real world tests and five 3D games. We dropped the Adobe Reader scrolling test due to significant inconsistencies in results using the latest versions of Adobe Reader.
Here are the results from our 2.16 GHz 15" MacBook Pro:
| Test | Mac OS X | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
10.4.8
|
10.4.7
|
Perf. Chg. %
|
|
| Benchmarks: | |||
| Altivec Fractal 1.3+ (GFLOPS) |
4.2
|
4.1
|
+2
|
|
Cinebench 9.6 - Rendering (2X)
|
627
|
628
|
-0
|
|
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
|
2998
|
2888
|
+4
|
| Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0+ (sec) |
11
|
15
|
+27
|
| Xbench 1.3 - CPU |
84
|
83
|
+1
|
| - Threading |
214
|
210
|
+2
|
| - Memory |
118
|
118
|
0
|
| - Quartz Graphics |
116
|
113
|
+3
|
| - OpenGL Graphics |
163
|
157
|
+4
|
| - User Interface Graphics |
269
|
246
|
+9
|
| "Real World" Tests: | |||
| Startup (sec) |
25
|
28
|
+11
|
| Shutdown (sec) |
10
|
10
|
0
|
| Dup. 500 MB Folder of Files (sec) |
39
|
33
|
-18
|
| Export QT FQDV in iMovie HD 6.0.3 (sec) |
49
|
47
|
-2
|
|
3D Game Tests
|
|||
| Quake III Arena 1.32-Intel (frames/sec) |
429
|
426
|
+1
|
|
Halo 2.0 (frames/sec)
|
42
|
40
|
+4
|
| Call of Duty 1.5+ (frames/sec) |
36
|
35
|
+3
|
| Doom 3 1.3A MQ (frames/sec) |
67
|
62
|
+8
|
| Quake 4 MQ (frames/sec) |
50
|
66
|
-24
|
There are few changes worth mentioning:
Let1kWindowsBloom is much faster (27 percent) in 10.4.8. It measures the speed of opening an closing windows in the finder.
The startup time is also faster (11 percent) in 10.4.8 but it had slowed in 10.4.7 so it is about the same in 10.4.8 as it was in 10.4.6.
Duplicating a folder is much slower (18 percent) but we believe that this is due to our drive becoming nearly full after setting up Windows in Parallels and in a separate partition under Apple's Boot Camp.
Quake 4 is much slower in 10.4.8 while all other test games show slight but insignificant increases in performance. Curiously, Quake 4 improved significantly with the ATI drivers in 10.4.7 versus those in 10.4.6 (66 fps vs 56 fps) but the decrease in performance in 10.4.8 slows the games well below the speed under 10.4.6 (50 fps vs 56 fps).
Altivec Fractal is slightly faster in Mac OS X 10.4.8. It measures the performance of the vector math library in PowerPC CPUs and its running in Rosetta so we are not sure why there is a change for the better but it is very small anyway.
Here are the results from our 24" 2.33GHz iMac Core 2 Duo:
| Test | Mac OS X | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
10.4.8
|
10.4.7
|
Perf. Chg. %
|
|
| Benchmarks: | |||
| Altivec Fractal 1.3+ (GFLOPS) |
9.8
|
8.7
|
+13
|
|
Cinebench 9.6 - Rendering (2X)
|
724
|
724
|
0
|
|
- OpenGL Hardware Lighting
|
4376
|
4418
|
-1
|
| Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0+ (sec) |
7
|
7
|
0
|
| Xbench 1.3 - CPU |
121
|
120
|
+1
|
| - Threading |
233
|
234
|
-0
|
| - Memory |
128
|
130
|
-2
|
| - Quartz Graphics |
165
|
166
|
-0
|
| - OpenGL Graphics |
169
|
144
|
+17
|
| - User Interface Graphics |
476
|
472
|
+1
|
| "Real World" Tests: | |||
| Startup (sec) |
19
|
18
|
-6
|
| Shutdown (sec) |
7
|
7
|
0
|
| Dup. 500 MB Folder of Files (sec) |
25
|
25
|
0
|
| Export QT FQDV in iMovie HD 6.0.3 (sec) |
38
|
38
|
0
|
|
3D Game Tests
|
|||
| Quake III Arena 1.32-Intel (frames/sec) |
837
|
835
|
+0
|
|
Halo 2.0 (frames/sec)
|
91
|
91
|
0
|
| Call of Duty 1.5+ (frames/sec) |
60
|
58
|
+3
|
| Doom 3 1.3A MQ (frames/sec) |
128
|
128
|
0
|
| Quake 4 MQ (frames/sec) |
96
|
95
|
+1
|
There are even fewer changes in the iMac Core 2 Duo's performance worth mentioning:
Altivec Fractal is much faster (13 percent) under 10.4.8 than 10.4.7. This is consistent with the small speed increase that we saw in the MacBook Pro.
The Xbench OpenGL graphics test is much faster (17 percent) in 10.4.8 but other tests using OpenGL (Cinebench and the 3D games) show no improvement.
In summary, the most remarkable change is the decrease in the speed of Quake 4 in the MacBook Pro which uses ATI graphics. This result is puzzling because the significant change between Mac OS X 10.4.6 and 10.4.7 was a general improvement in OpenGL performance, including Quake 4. There must be some issues in the new drivers that selectively affect Quake 4 because no other games appear affected. Also, the game performance of the iMac, which uses Nvidia graphics, did not change significantly.
We have benchmarked virtually every publicly-released version of Mac OS X--see the archives.[Bill Fox]
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