Brief Hands-On Report--Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Leopard Graphics Update 1.0--How Fast is It?

Apple finally released the 10.5.2 update for Leopard and the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 a week ago. They are available via Software Update or as stand-alone files from this Apple Web page.

We (Dana is still tending to his Macs) downloaded and installed the updates via Software Update with no problems on a number of Macs, including: 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo, 24" aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo, 12" 1.4 GHz PowerBook G4 and 1.4GHz PowerMac G4 Cube.

So far the updates seem to have fixed all of the issues I had with Leopard on my MacBook Pro but not the occasional freezes on Dana's iMac. I haven't had a kernel panic or loss of video on wake from sleep, an unexpected quit of Dreamweaver CS3 or an inadvertent wake from sleep caused by Apple's aluminum wireless keyboard.

One of our problems with Leopard was slow OpenGL graphics performance in our speed tests. I had just a short time in between trips to check OpenGL performance and it seems to have improved. The Cinebench 9.5 OpenGL Hardware Graphics test increased marginally from 4023 to 4122, the Xbench 1.3 OpenGL test increased a more substantially from 129 to 161 and, finally, the Quake III Arena UB test surged from 398 frames/sec to a whopping 686 frames/sec. I'll do some more extensive testing next weekend when I return from travel but OpenGL graphics are looking good, at least on my MacBook Pro.

So, my conclusion is that 10.5.2 looks good enough to update my daughter's 17" 1GHz Powerbook G4 and spouse's 24" 2.33GHz white iMac from 10.4.11 to 10.5.2 next weekend. [Bill Fox]