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Early Tiger Benchmarks Show Slight Speed-Ups

Posted by timothy on from the fine-tuning-ahead dept.

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?"

11 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Debug symbols by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Was it built with debugging symbols on?

  2. Give me a break... by Chief+Typist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This release was obviously pulled together for the conference -- a Herculean effort by the engineers at Apple to show what will be available in a year for now. A wonderful release for us third-party developers!

    No one in their right mind is going to think that this release is fit for benchmarking. There may be some gains that are side effects of internal changes (new versions of gcc, etc.), but anyone with a clue will realize that minimal optimization has been done.

    When they say DEVELOPER PREVIEW they mean it...

    -ch

    1. Re:Give me a break... by (mandos) · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So, if we're already seeing gains in the "unoptimized" version, then we should see some great speedups in the final version a year from now. Seems to me that these benchmarks do serve a purpose by letting us know that we are getting "Bigger, Better, and Faster" rather then the Windows version of that, which is typically slower.

      Mike Scanlon

    2. Re:Give me a break... by Ineffable+27 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What you're describing is definitely true for 10.0 --> 10.1 --> 10.2 --> 10.3; I suspect that much of that has to do with how new OS X is/was, and how many improvements they needed to make to the 'not ready for prime time' releases 10.0 and 10.1. (Don't be surprised if 'snappiness' of performance starts to 'plateau' with subsequent OS X releases.)

      But I don't think your generalization holds prior to OS X. Many users who moved from OS 8 --> OS 9 found they had to upgrade their RAM to achieve the same performance and responsiveness (depending on their machine). I suspect the same was true during the transition from System 7 --> OS 8.

      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.

      --
      "He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." - Steve Jobs on Bill Gates
    3. Re:Give me a break... by frankie · · Score: 4, Insightful
      No, you should give us a break. You're being willfully obtuse.
      • When you upgrade from Win2K to WinXP (and presumably to Longhorn or whatever), bloat increases and speed decreases.
      • When you upgrade from 10.0 to Puma to Jaguar to Panther (and presumably to 10.4), features increase AND speed increases.
      That's the comparison worth mentioning. And yes, I agree that Steve is rude for not providing version discounts (except for 10.1 which was free, thanks Steve). Nevertheless, each upgrade has been worth my money.
  3. Re:Move along by foidulus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't most of the speed increases come closer towards the end of the development cycle? I know that is usually the case for games.

  4. Re:Move along by radicalskeptic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah. And Tiger is to be released in the first half of 2005. Which gives them between 5-11 months to make these changes.

    I think it's just too early to tell how fast the final release is going to be, since there's probably 3/4 of a year more development to be done.

    --
    WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
  5. Missing the big picture by Cycline3 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I think everyone has missed the bigger picture here. As OS X evolves - it gets better AND faster. I run both PCs and Macs at home and the office and I can say that with every new version of Linux and Windows, the new features have cost in terms of performance. Only OS X has repeatedly delivered speed and features. Say what you will, but Apple is just doing something right with OS X. I can't imagine being stuck in a Windows (or Linux) only world after using OS X for an extended time. Kudos to Apple. I for one am eagerly awaiting Tiger's official release.

    -Sean

  6. Re:Move along by RevAaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Quite. Some even consider premature/early optimization to be a bit of a curse, or at least not a very good idea. In software development in general, definately not just limited to games.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  7. Tests by whfsdude · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Keep in mind these tests were done on the G5's. Tiger is the only version of Mac OS X to have 64bit support. One has to wonder if it is really faster on non-64 bit operating systems.

  8. Don't forget compiler optimizations by hargettp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Although you do make good points about debug symbols mostly taking a space instead of slowing things down, one can't forget the compiler optimizations that are often enabled in release builds but not enabled in debug builds. Without those optimizations (particularly for C++ apps, as many commercial software products are still C++), some operations may be orders of magnitude slower.

    Hence, not suprising that debug builds are often perceived as slower.