Follow Up--Mac OS X 10.5.2, How Fast Is It?

Two weeks ago Apple released the 10.5.2 update for Leopard and the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0. They are available via Software Update or as stand-alone files from this Apple Web page. Last Monday, I posted some quick speed test results that were focused on OpenGL graphics so today here are the results from the remainder of my usual suite of speed tests.

Speed of 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo running Leopard vs Tiger

Test	10.5.2	10.5.1	10.4.9	Performance Change (%)
BENCHMARKS	10.5.1vs10.4.9
Altivec Fractal 1.3 (GFLOPS)	9.8	9.6	10.0	-4
Cinebench 9.5 Rendering (2x)	646	707	738	-4
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	4122	4027	3903	+3
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0+	11	11	8	-38
Xbench 1.3 - CPU	150	137	122	+11
- Threading	188	187	236	-21
- Memory	158	159	135	+18
- Quartz Graphics	192	201	175	+15
- OpenGL Graphics	161	129	137	-6
-User Interface Graphics	326	303	432	-30
"REAL WORLD" TESTS
Startup (sec)	52	56	31	-80
Shutdown (sec)	7	8	10	+20
Dup. 500 MB Folder (sec)	63	62	61	-2
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	686	398	407	-2
Halo 2.0.2 (frames/sec)	115	100	86	+16

In our original speed test that compared Tiger (10.4.9) to Leopard (10.5.1), Leopard ran substantially slower on four tests: Let1kwindowsbloom, Xbench 1.3 Threading, Xbench 1.3 User Interface Graphics and Startup time. The latest Leopard update 10.5.2 shows a slight improvement in two of them, Xbench 1.3 User Interface Graphics and Startup time.

Leopard 10.5.1 ran substantially faster than Tiger 10.4.9 in four tests: Xbench 1.3 Memory, Xbench 1.3 Quartz Graphics, Shutdown time and Halo frame rate. 10.5.2 shows a further improvement in two of them: Shutdown time and Halo frame rate.

Most notably, there are clear improvements in OpenGL performance in 10.5.2 as shown by Cinebench OpenGL Hardware Lighting (+2%), Xbench 1.3 OpenGL Graphics (+25%), Quake II Arena (+72%) and Halo (+15%). [Bill Fox]