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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?"

14 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Move along by isd_glory · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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.
    3. Re:Move along by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      IIRC, Apple's X implementation is a fork of XFree with some custom enhancements to run in rootless mode under Aqua and integrate with the native window manager and hardware drawing acceleration. So it's really "neither". If you were so inclined, presumably you could load up Darwin/XNU in console mode and compile and run either XFree or X.org fullscreen, since the code bases are almost identical at this point.

  2. Is this version of Tiger by foidulus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. 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 Orick · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Kirby Reviews

    3. Re:Give me a break... by johnpaul191 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  4. 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

  5. Perceived speed vs throughput by caseih · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Perceived speed vs throughput by zhiwenchong · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Perceived speed vs throughput by John+Newman · · Score: 5, Interesting
      It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish
      At least some of that sluggishness is by design. I used to be rather frustrated at the glacially slow appearance and disappearance of sheets in OSX. It was most apparent when opening or saving files, and when using a certain spreadsheet that relies on sheets in all of its wizards. Just that one element made the whole UI feel slow, especially compared to Windows. Until I discovered that the speed of sheets is set by a system variable, which I immediately cut by three-quarters. Presto! Lightning-quick sheets, and a much-happier me.

      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.
    3. Re:Perceived speed vs throughput by j1walker · · Score: 5, Informative

      There's an article about this on macosxhints.com here:

      http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040 51208143172&query=sheet+speed

      I'm off to try this myself now...