Hands-On Report: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion--How fast is it?
Apple released Mac OS X 10.7, its latest operating system, code-named Lion on July 20th. Having recently speed tested the last version of Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6.8, I immediately installed Lion and put it through its paces with my usual speed tests for comparison. I was eager to test Lion because the initial version of Snow Leopard (10.6) was much slower in graphics than the final version of Leopard (10.5.8) and it took until the final version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) to finally surpass Leopard.
So, how fast is Lion?
My first test computer is a 2008 dual quad 2.8GHz Mac Pro with 10GB of RAM, the fastest Mac graphics card currently available, an ATI Radeon HD 5870, and a 1TB 7200RPM hard disk drive. Here are the results:
| Test | Mac OS X | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
GRAPHICS BENCHMARKS |
10.7 | 10.6.8 | % |
Cinebench 11.5 |
|||
-- CPU Rendering (8x) |
6.61 | 6.54 | +1 |
-- OpenGL Hardware Lighting |
29.8 | 26.0 | +15 |
Xbench 1.3 |
|||
-- Quartz Graphics |
270 | 233 | +16 |
-- OpenGL Graphics |
288 | 282 | +2 |
-- User Interface Graphics |
357 | 387 | -8 |
OpenGL Viewer 3.37 |
|||
-- 2.1 Cube |
2829 | 2671 | +6 |
FINDER/DISK TESTS
|
|||
Start Up (sec)
|
30 | 26 | -13 |
Shut Down (sec) |
26 | 7 | -73 |
Dup. 500 MB Folder (sec) |
26 | 23 | -12 |
GAME TESTS
|
|||
Quake III Arena (frames/sec) |
995 | 978 | +2 |
Halo 2.0.4 (frames/sec) |
197 | 211 | -7 |
For all but two of the graphics-related benchmarks and games, scores are faster but mostly only marginally so. On the other hand, the scores related to the Finder and disk operations are slower, again marginally so except for Shut Down. Shutting down takes much longer in Lion on my Mac Pro than in Snow Leopard.
My second test computer is a 13" mid-2010 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics and a 240GB OWC Extreme Pro SSD. And the results are:
| Test | Mac OS X | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
GRAPHICS BENCHMARKS |
10.7 | 10.6.8 | % |
Cinebench 11.5 |
|||
-- CPU Rendering (2x) |
1.34 | 1.35 | -1 |
-- OpenGL Hardware Lighting |
12.3 | 12.4 | -1 |
Xbench 1.3 |
|||
-- Quartz Graphics |
189 | 153 | +24 |
-- OpenGL Graphics |
134 | 170 | -21 |
-- User Interface Graphics |
90 | 239 | -62 |
OpenGL Viewer 3.37 |
|||
-- 2.1 Cube |
569 | 563 | +1 |
FINDER/DISK TESTS
|
|||
Start Up (sec)
|
18 | 30 | +40 |
Shut Down (sec) |
4 | 6 | +33 |
Dup. 500 MB Folder (sec) |
24 | 30 | +20 |
GAME TESTS
|
|||
Quake III Arena (frames/sec) |
408 | 383 | +7 |
Halo 2.0.4 (frames/sec) |
-- | -- | -- |
The results from the MacBook Pro are about the opposite of those from the Mac Pro. The graphics lean slower and the Finder/Disk operations are generally faster than using the last version of Snow Leopard.
Aside from the CPU speed and number of cores, one has ATI graphics and the other has Nvidia graphics and one has a standard 7200RPM hard disk drive and the other has an SSD which may account for the differences.
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