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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?"
built with the new version of gcc that Apple is releasing with Tiger. The compiled code(on both G4 and G5, moreso on the G5 which they used) is supposed to be much more efficient for certain operations than the previous version of GCC. Wonder if they used this?
more info here
Exactly. With Windows, a new OS release seems to mean you need to upgrade your computer. The history for Macs seems to be more like a new OS release allowing you to use your older computer a little longer.
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Kirby Reviews
it is funny..... someone was playing with my G4 400 last week and commented how it seemed a lot faster than their much newer machine.... turns out they were still running 10.2.x and i was running 10.3.x. i have to say i'm happy that 10.3 keeps the machine usable that much longer, i hope 10.4 is at least as usable.
I always find it funny, Microsoft can be the most successful software vendor on the planet, but a company with what maybe 5% of their value (if that) can come up and best them time and time again. With that much cash shouldn't they be able to buy all the developers possible?
Perceived speed is actually quite important; from the perspective of a personal computer user, it is quite possibly more important than actual throughput. It influences a user's beliefs about his own productivity on the machine, which in turn affects actual productivity. I don't know about you, but on a machine where widgets just zip, I work faster... slow GUIs have the effect of insidiously slowing me down.
Somehow the responsiveness of the Panther UI leaves something to be desired. (I'm running OS X 10.3.4 on a 1GHz G4/768MB RAM)
It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish, and in some cases more sluggish than in Windows apps. High-end G5 Mac users probably don't notice it, but it is actually quite obvious on midrange Macs. One gets used to it, of course, and very soon one ceases to be bothered by it--but one cannot help but feel it when one uses a Windows machine at work.
John Siracusa at ArsTechnica actually did an informal test (on scrolling and such, somewhere in this review) and recorded the results in a Quicktime movie file. He compared the speed of Cocoa controls to Win32 controls.
This is also evident if you compare Cocoa to X11. Even the UI in X11 apps running under OS X is more responsive than Cocoa, especially in scrolling. I'm not entirely sure why this is but some people attribute it to overheads in Cocoa.
In my own experience, I have come to the (unscientific) conclusion that for now, Windows apps do seem more responsive than Mac OS X apps on comparable machines (1GHz G4/768MB RAM vis-a-vis a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4/256MB RAM). That doesn't mean the Win32 apps are actually faster, mind you, just that their UIs feel that way. This would one area where Apple could make improvements on, and I think it will.
P.S. Having said all that, Mac OS X has many productivity enhancing features that compensate for its UI sluggishness: robust and fast multitasking, extensive keyboard control, aesthetically pleasant UI, automation capabailities, exceptionally well-designed tools, creatively crafted free apps (like Butler and Tofu) from the community etc. Yes, I cannot deny that I am actually more productive and creative in je ne sais quoi ways on my Mac than on Windows.... for the most part, it's just more pleasant to work on a Mac.
You're generally right about "perceived speed". This article explains how:
10 Things Apple did to make Mac OS X faster.
I was thinking this is because OS X is increasing it's 64 'bitness' or are you using it on a g4?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
So I think much of the perceived slowness of OSX's UI has nothing at all to do with how fast the machine is actually capable of performing the pretty functions, even on rather humble hardware (like my oldish iBook).
That and the "action-on-release" instead of "action-on-click" thing. It may make the UI feel less "snappy", since all actions are delayed by however long it takes you to take your finger off the mouse button, but it certainly makes for a more pleasant experience.
What is it about debugging code? It almost mythical the level of speed upds people think they'll gain once all this debug code has gone.
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
I finally got 10.3 install on my Beige G3/333 using XPostFacto. It took 10 times and I finally figured out is was the ATI Radeon 7000 that was failing the install @ the BSD subsystem. I attached my monitor to the built in video, used the 'Use old NDRVs' selection and it went to town. I didnt remove any of the PCI cards, but I did remove my USB mouse and hub. I attached my old keyboard and mouse. Here's my setup:
:D
Beige G3/333 MT Rev 3
640 Megs of Ram
40 Gig HD & an 80 Gig HD - OS X is install on the 1st 8 gig of the 40.
PCI OHCI USB card
PCI ATI Radeon 7000
Don't give up. You can get it installed.
The upside is, that I have be forced to learn where X hides everything. When I moved from 9 to X is was lost, but I'm feeling at home again.
M Prindle
Put another way, what do the newer cards have that I don't? Core Image looks to me like the best new feature in Tiger, if I can actually use it. Quartz Extreme gave me a pretty good speed increase when it came out, and I would expect CoreImage to allow most graphics programs to work snappier, but that's all irrelevant if my card isn't up to snuff.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
It's clear Apple is out to lunch on games. However this isn't that bad. What they need to do is cause a paradigm shift on games! Back to the console using the computer. What they REALLY should start doing is, since both the PS3 and GameCube are going to be PPC based (I doubt M$ would play along) find out some way to work with the GameCube and PS3 for a sweet gaming experience on the Mac. If the DS has some standard wireless tech it should be able to work with any Mac. Heck think about it, we already have some great emulators available. How about the iGames ROM Store? Have everything from classic SNES games, to N64, to GameCube, to whatever revolution will be called. Get SEGA on board, who knows maybe even Sony could be convinced to play along with PS1 tittles. Apple could move on games, but to compete with Microsoft, they would need to do it in an entirely different way.
The speed up from release to release is mostly due to the fact that Apple engineers were thinking ahead when they designed the software. Not because it is less mature.
Basically the hardware is finally catching up to the design of the software.
I'm talking mostly about the gui system here, the command line/ unix stuff is very well optimized for what it does but the GUI has yet to be enhanced.
Aqua, Quartz, Cocoa and the drawing APIs for OSX were designed such that they can be accelerated easier by future graphics cards easier. Remember that when OSX first came out the graphics cards that were in most macs was the Rage Pro or below. Now that much more powerful graphics cards are coming out it's possible to use that power for GUI, but an API was needed to access it. Aqua, Quartz, allow some access and the new CoreVideo allows even more access to the underlying graphics hardware. Windows API doesn't allow access to the graphics hardware in the windowing envoriment, any advanced features you have to use DirectX/OpenGL and those APIs are not designed with a multi-program, windowing enviroment in mind (well OpenGL can handle it better then DirectX ever could on SGI but not so on Windows X86 machines, DirectX is designed for games).
i would imagine this to be the case, at least to a small degree. ever try loading windows 3.1 on a new machine and see the difference between it and win98 or 2000/xp? you'll see a similar example.
os9, like win3.1 isn't nearly as complex as osx or nt. there will be some things that run faster, but as another user said, if you are doing lots of multitasking i suspect you would notice a large negative difference...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away