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Early Tiger Benchmarks Show Slight Speed-Ups
GatorMarc writes "Geek Patrol has published early speed benchmark tests on Tiger. Despite the fact that Tiger is still in development, the results are promising. Could we see a similar performance improvement as we did upgrading from Jaguar to Panther?"
From the article: "Looking at the results, it appears that Tiger is as fast (if not faster) than Panther in all areas except for UI performance." His numbers show Tiger barely edging out Panther, using Xbench (a purely synthetic benchmark) as the test basis.
I've tried Tiger out on my G4 powerbook, and have actually noticed a *decrease* in Xbench ratings, despite an overall "snappier" feel. Maybe the increase isn't really going to happen for those without 64 bit machines. Then again, its a pre-relase, so there is plenty of room for change.
These two benchmarks seem to be continuously confused by slashdotters over the years. Of course it is debatable which is really more important. I think OS X has definitely concentrated on perceived speed, which is good because that is what the user "feels" and sees as he interacts with the computer. This does in no way mean the whole OS is faster; it just feels faster.
OS X has definitely not improved dramatically in throughput and raw horsepower over the last few releases. In fact I'm sure it has decreased slightly. Sacrificing a little of that throughput for smoother rendering yields a significant percieved speedup that the users really like. I would say that every release of OS X has gotten a little heavier and is a little bit slower. A sacrifice I'm willing to make for my pretty Panther desktop, though.
Windows has gotten slower on both counts over the years.
Linux's throughput has actually increased fairly dramatically in the last year or two. Unfortunately as the weight of the desktop comes to bear, and due to current weaknesses in X11 and the toolkits (most notably the lack synchronized redraw which make resizing appear really slow), the perceived speed of linux has seemed to decrease with recent distros. The 2.6 kernel provided some speedup in this area (the interactive scheduler), but there is still much work to be done.
The experimental X server from www.freedesktop.org implements a lot of features that will lead to a perceived speedup. For example the damage and composite extension reduce redraws when windows are uncovered. Work is also being done to allow windows to resize smoothly (synchronizing the widget drawing and compressing events). Even with the vesa driver and no acceleration, it feels faster than normal accelerated X.org. Again perceived speed vs throughput. Give it a try. It's cool.
Fortunately I think Linux will deliver on both benchmarks. Expect exciting things over the next year from linux desktops.
64-bits doesn't make normal operations faster.
64 bits makes big number crunching faster, and allows you to access more memory, and that's it.
To be more precise: it makes 64 bit integer number crunching faster (as opposed to floating point).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"What is it about debugging code? It's almost mythical the level of speed upds people think they'll gain once all this debug code has gone."
People are ignorant...
Okay, for you non-developer folks playing along at home, here's what you need to know:
1. "Debugging Symbols" are extra information stored (typically) in the program's executable file, that make it easier to run that code under a source-level debugger and see the right names for variables, functions, and other program entities.
In general, any software that's released to customers (yes, INCLUDING beta versions) will have the debugging symbols "stripped" from the programs, because they're not useful for the customer, and also because many companies fear (for no apparent good reason) that they represent a leak of confidential information. There is a slight performance penalty on some platforms for running a binary with symbols, but it's only going to effect load time, and only by a tiny fraction.
2. "Debugging Code" is not as well defined of a term, but sometimes, early development builds of software will include extra checks on the integrity of key data structures, or extra error-recovery code. Again, in general, these sorts of builds would never be distributed to a customer.
3. So why do programs generally improve in performance towards the end of the development cycle? It's for the rather self-evident reason that the software has to be working correctly before it's worth the effort to try to make it run faster. In fact, optimizing performance before the feature set has been frozen is one of the classic blunders of software development!
-Mark
Panther is, aggravatingly, still not nearly as responsive as OS 9 on the same hardware. They still have some way to go. I hope Tiger finally closes this gap.
Do you ever run more then one application at a time?
Mac OS X is far more responsive and efficient then Mac OS 9 under any amount of load.
The ATI Rage M6 chipset is underpowered, and is unlikely to be supported by Quartz Extreme, much less Core Image. Apparently, it's a Rage 128 derivative. found in the 550 and 667 MHz Powerbook G4s. Quartz Extreme relies on hardware support for GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, which Apple notes is only supported by "Radeon, Radeon Mobility, Radeon 7500 Mobility, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9000, Radeon 9200, Radeon 9600, Radeon 9700, Radeon 9800,GeForce 2MX, GeForce 4MX, GeForce 3, GeForce 4Ti, GeForce FX." Presumably, you can verify this for yourself by running a GLInfo program.
Apparently, it's less flexible than the proposed GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two.
Core Image is much more sophisticated, and levergaes the vertex and pixel fragment capabilities of an current generation OpenGL card.
Just to clarify, Core Image requires least a Radeon 9500 or GeForceFX 5200 to use all the features, although the library does scale. These cards support floating point vertex and fragment shaders.
"Radeon Mobility" -> RageM6.
So yes, it supports Quartz Extreme indeed. But as those models only came with 16 Megs of VideoRAM, IIRC, support is limited.
As to Core Image, it is not designed to improve performance, but to add, for example, visual feedback through effects. For example, when opening a Dashboard widget on a fully Core Image-supported computer, you get a water ripple effect. If your graphics hardware is word, the effect simply gets discarded - which doesn't remove any functionality. You can already see similar things in Panther, like the fast user switching cube effect, which doesn't appear on slower machines.
Ligatures rule!
This is not an official Fugazi sig.