Mac OS X 10.5.7--How fast is it?

Yesterday evening, Apple finally released Mac OS X 10.5.7 update, both client and server editions. 10.5.6 came out December 15, 2008, so its been awhile. They are available for download via Software Update or as a stand-alone updater from this Apple Web page. If you use the stand-alone updater, I always recommend the combo updater to ensure that you have all the files from all previous updates that 10.5.7 needs. The build number of the final release of 10.5.7 is 9J61.

I had no problem installing Mac OS X 10.5.7, including the Server edition, on my Macs: MacBook Air, Mac Pro, PowerMac G4 Cube, iMac Core 2 Duo and PowerBook G4. I mostly used Software Update but I used the combo updater on my Mac Pro.

Mac OS X 10.5.7 is supposed to have the new ATI drivers for the ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card that I ordered back on March 5th and finally received April 29th. Unfortunately, it could not be used then because no drivers were included in the package and none were in 10.5.6. Apple erred in sending the card early but graciously called me and apologized that I would have to wait for the release of 10.5.7. Two weeks later, i.e. yesterday evening, Veronica from Apple called me to say that 10.5.7 was available for download and it contained the new ATI Radeon 4870 drivers. Despite this very good customer service from Apple, I do not see any new ATI drivers after installing 10.5.7. They are all dated 1/16/2008 and none have a 48xx name. Perhaps, I need to have the card installed first? I'll check this out later.

After installing 10.5.7, I re-ran Software Update to get the Safari 4 Public Beta 5528.17 update that is available to those running Safari 4 Public Beta after installing 10.5.7. I've tried all the apps that I frequently use like Safari, Mail, iWork, Office 2008, Dreamweaver CS3, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 and Parallels 4 running Windows XP. None presented any problems. I also updated Adobe Reader and Acrobat with yesterdays updates from Adobe. Everything seems to work fine.

So how fast is 10.5.7?

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 10.5.7. Here are the results comparing 10.5.7 with 10.5.6 and 10.5.5:

Speed of Mac OS X 10.5.7 vs 10.5.6 and 10.5.5 (Higher is faster)

Test	Mac Pro	Mac Pro	Mac Pro	MacBook Pro 2.4GHz C2D
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version	10.5.7	10.5.6	10.5.5	10.5.2
Cinebench R10 Rendering (8x)	18751	18136	18870	n/a
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	5927	6062	5301	n/a
Xbench 1.3
- Quartz Graphics	244	227	205	192
- OpenGL Graphics	174	196	198	161
-User Interface Graphics	450	400	385	326
"REAL WORLD" TESTS
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	981	970	986	686
Halo 2.0.3 (frames/sec)	169	169	99	115

There is nothing remarkable speed-wise about the graphics performance of Mac OS X 10.5.7 when using the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card. I'm hopeful that my new ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card will improve the graphics performance significantly. That will be the subject of my next article--stay tuned! [Bill Fox]