“One of the biggest features of Snow Leopard isn’t something apparent to the naked eye: software tweaks and refinements intended to make OS X a leaner, meaner OS for your fighting Apple machine. But is Snow Leopard really any faster? Now that I’ve successfully upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard I’ve got some benchmarking results to share,” Chris Rawson reports for TUAW.
“While the performance gains aren’t huge, they do seem to reflect the optimizations present in Snow Leopard,” Rawson reports. “And this is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Snow Leopard’s potential. Once developers start taking advantage of new technologies like Grand Central and OpenCL, applications in OS X will be screamingly fast.”
Full article, with the benchmarks, here.
these benchmarks seem pretty pointless.
I wouldn’t expect these types of benchmarks (pure hardware) to be affected much by the OS. The huge gains would be seen when actually benchmarking functions of the OS and Applications.
Snow Leopard is overrated and buggy. I want my money back!
First rule of software:
Never ever go with version 1.0
Let the people who need the latest greatest do the testing for you.
@ ErnieP
Buggy? I have found that it resolves most if not all of the Bugs I found in Leopard and they didn’t add any new ones (that I found yet). Final Cut and Logic Studio are both much faster and able to handle much more data simultaneously then with Leopard.
So, Great Job Apple keep up the Great Work!
@Geddy
You are right. It’s a shame that so many software providers no release their final Beta as a 1.0 product. Even game developers have started doing that. I won’t touch a product until it hits x.1. It’s pretty absurd. I blame Google. I don’t know why, I just do.
My perceived increase in performance from actually “doing stuff” in Snow Leopard versus Leopard is much greater than the “benchmark” results in this article.
Cool. The astroturfers are already here.
OK, ken1w, some basic numbers? Please? I know it can be annoying and difficult to go through all the re-booting and such to get a “clean” system to test, but you (at least, unlike me) have the system to test with. A basic run with Safari (load MDN), then GarageBand (load to a naked ‘podcast’), then iPhoto (load your library), then Pages (load a template) … with nothing else running, then with one other program “running”. It’s a bit much to ask, I know, but you say you’ve tried something ‘like’ it already.
I’ve got some numbers. My test: Doing something that you do constantly, opening a window in the Finder. What I did was open my Apps folder, size it the height of my screen where I get 53 apps listed (list view). Close it. Reboot.
Leopard took a blink of an eye (~.5 sec) to show the list, and another 10 seconds to populate the “size” field in the window (calculate folder sizes was turned OFF). Scrolling while populating the size field was slow, really slow. Once I had scrolled throughout the entire apps folder, subsequent window openings & scrollings were nearly instantaneous.
Snow Leopard took nearly 3 seconds to just show the list of files, and over 35 seconds to populate the size fields. Scrolling was also very slow while the size fields were updating.
I’m not impressed, especially since doing something as common as opening a window should have received a fair helping of speed grease. While I’m sure SL is some day going to offer us better & faster ways of doing things, today it doesn’t.
Wish you could edit your post. Left something out.
After reboot and things settle down, open the previously closed apps window. Then start your stopwatch.
rosetta is seriously slow on sl compared to leopard
appleworks is virtually unusable now 🙁
Hey MDN.
THOSE LITTLE POP UP BOXES SSSSUUUUUCCCCKKK!!!!!
I effing hate them. Please get rid of them.
Thank you.
The speed increase with SL makes it feel as though I’m using a different machine. Other colleagues are reporting similar results.
Wingsy,
I’m not sure what you have done to your Snow Leopard. I have done pretty much exactly what you did (in addtion to what DL Meyer asked — opening iPhoto, iTunes, Mail, Safari, GarageBand) and in EVERY single instance, SnowLeopard was significantly faster — between 2x – 25x faster (!!!).
I boot up Snow Leopard, let it completely settle down (little or no activity on hard disk). Then I start clicking. Safari opens instantaneously (difficult to even start/stop the stopwatch). Mail opens (almost) instantaneously. Applications window pops up instantaneously, icons (some 60 of them) show in a second or two. GarageBand, iPhoto, iTunes come up at least 2-4 times faster than before. This is on 2007 MB (Intel integrated graphics), as well as 2008 MBP.
I tried your test, did exactly as you posted, near instantaneous opening and populating the applications window, tried it twice, between reboots, I`m happy with SL, running it on an older MBP 2Ghz with 2 gigs ram.
Has anybody upgraded their hackintosh netbooks to SL yet?
@ Predrag:
The difference between your observations and the others’ is that yours isn’t coated in astroturf.
My Leopard has been awfully snappy!
Has anyone used Golive 6.0 with SL?
I’ve been a cheap bastard, and never upgraded. It’s a little creaky with Leopard, and I hope to avoid upgrading to 9.0 when I install SL tomorrow.
wingsy,
Yaozers!!! I think there is something wrong with your computer…
I tried your test on SL and (I even have calculate all sizes turned on) scrolling is extremely fast. Granted, the folders size calculation takes about 6-7 seconds, but scrolling is fast fast fast.
I even tried resizing the window as I went along and it was snappy.
Could your hard drive be having issues?
“but scrolling is fast fast fast.”
You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! Until you try SmartScroll – updated for SL by the end of this week.
ragarcia and Animal Trainer …
Yea, screw a buncha “screamingly fast” Bullshit Benchmarks
We wanna know how it stacks up against the Snappy Standard™
BC
Hey pDrag
Yea, I concur with your “instantaneous” observations
Now when I open my Folder of Porn™ with 28,356 pics
That damn thing will load up before I can even get my pants unzipped …
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BC
BC Kelly,
All I can say is, it is SNAPpy!!
Is it Wingsy, or is it really Ballmer?