iMac Software Update 1.1--How Fast Is It?

On Friday, we noted that Apple had released iMac Software Update 1.1 for the new aluminum iMacs and that it contained new ATI Radeon X2000 graphics drivers. One of the things we noted in our review of the 24" 2.8GHz aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo, was that its OpenGL graphics performance, especially using the game Doom3, was not on par with its predecessor 24" 2.33GHz white iMac Core 2 Duo with CTO Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT graphics.

We speculated that the Open GL 3D game performance issue might be due to immature graphics drivers for the new iMac's ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO graphics. So, we re-ran several of our graphics speed tests to find out if the new drivers in the iMac Software Update 1.1 improved the game performance. Here are the results with iMac Software Update 1.1 installed are in the first column:

Speed Comparisons of 2.8 GHz Aluminum iMac C2D

Test	2.80GHz Aluminum 24" iMac C2D	2.80GHz Aluminum 24" iMac C2D	2.33GHz White 24" iMac C2D
	w/ 1.1 Update
BENCHMARKS
Cinebench 9.5 Rendering (2x)	876	876	726
-- OpenGL Hardware Lighting	5091	5418	4416
Xbench 1.3
-- Quartz Graphics	206	200	167
-- OpenGL Graphics	156	154	169
-- User Interface Graphics	570	652	495
Doom 3 (frames/sec)	128	107	127

There are only two significant differences with and without the update. The main difference is that the framerate of Doom3 increased by 20 percent (128 vs 107) and the aluminum iMac tested on par with the framerate of the white iMac. The User Interface Graphics score in Xbench 1.3 dropped almost 13 percent but still is 15 percent higher than that of the previous iMac. [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]