Hands-On Report--Mac OS X 10.5.6, How Fast Is It! Really Good News

This article is a continuation of my series testing the speed of Mac OS X that stretches back to version 10.0. When I got my Dual Quad-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.5.2 with the upgraded graphics card, an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, I was disappointed in its graphics performance relative to my former MacBook Pro with much slower graphics, an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT. But I was hopeful that a subsequent update of Mac OS X would improve the Mac Pro's graphics performance but it has not happened. In fact, 10.5.5 was significantly slower on several graphics tests.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.6 on Monday, 12/15, with new graphics drivers, among other things, so my hope of improved graphics performance was again renewed. I installed Mac OS X 10.5.6 using Software Update on a number of Macs: Mac Pro, MacBook Air, iMac Core 2 Duo, PowerMac G4 Cube and PowerBook G4. Only the iMac had the installer problem noted in this Apple KB article and I fixed it by downloading and using the stand-alone combo installer. I have been using 10.5.6 since, experiencing no problems on any of the computers.

To find out if there are any performance improvements, I ran a graphics-related subset of my speed tests on my dual quad-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.5.6. Here are the results comparing 10.5.6 with 10.5.5 and 10.5.3:

Speed of Mac OS X 10.5.6 vs 10.5.5 and 10.5.3 (Higher is faster)

Test	Mac Pro	Mac Pro	Mac Pro	MacBook Pro 2.4GHz C2D
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version	10.5.6	10.5.5	10.5.3	10.5.2
Cinebench R10 Rendering (8x)	18136	18870	18964	n/a
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	6062	5301	5994	n/a
Xbench 1.3
- Quartz Graphics	227	205	227	192
- OpenGL Graphics	196	198	176	161
-User Interface Graphics	400	385	420	326
"REAL WORLD" TESTS
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	970	986	980	686
Halo 2.0.3 (frames/sec)	169	99	99	115

Red is faster by 10% or more than in 10.5.5.

Mac OS X 10.5.6 recovers the graphics speed drops that occurred in 10.5.5 (Cinebench OpenGL, Xbench Quartz Graphics and Xbench User Interface Graphics). Best of all, my vastly faster Mac Pro is finally faster at the OpenGL game Halo than my former MacBook Pro--10.5.6 is 70% faster than previous releases of Leopard on my Mac Pro!

Despite this driver progress, there are still even faster graphics cards for Wintels out there like the ATI Radeon HD 4870 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 280--some day I hope they will work on Mac OS X. [Bill Fox]