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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Upgrades Apple

Early Tiger Benchmarks Show Slight Speed-Ups 111

Posted by timothy 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?"
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Early Tiger Benchmarks Show Slight Speed-Ups More

Early Tiger Benchmarks Show Slight Speed-Ups

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  • Debug symbols (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 12, 2004 @09:24PM (#9681988)
    Was it built with debugging symbols on?

    • Re:Debug symbols (Score:1, Interesting)

      by duncangough ( 530657 )
      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.

      • All about "Debugging Code" vs "Debugging Symbols" (Score:5, Informative)

        by mbessey ( 304651 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @11:37AM (#9686662) Homepage Journal
        "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

  • Move along (Score:5, Informative)

    by isd_glory ( 787646 ) * on Monday July 12, 2004 @09:33PM (#9682054)
    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.

  • Is this version of Tiger (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Monday July 12, 2004 @09:35PM (#9682065)
    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 [apple.com]

  • Give me a break... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chief Typist ( 110285 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @09:45PM (#9682132) Homepage
    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

    • Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by (mandos) ( 90321 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @10:29PM (#9682406) Homepage
      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

      • Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Orick ( 796382 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @10:37PM (#9682456) Homepage
        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 [generalhouseware.com]

        • Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by johnpaul191 ( 240105 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @10:47PM (#9682510) Homepage
          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.

        • Re:Give me a break... (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You're really only seeing optimization of OS-X, which was a whole new ball game for Apple. The speed up is artificial - they're just working the sludge out of it. Windows (NT-based) is mature and will not get this boost, because it's well optimized at this point. You won't see any significant code optimization speed-ups soon, and you're probably getting to the end of Apple's run of them. Remember - you're basically complimenting them for making the previous versions slower than they had to be, and gladl

          • Bah (Score:1, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward
            What? WinXP won't run on my 386?? They're locking me out and PREVENTING me from installing their OS on machines they deem nece$$ary to upgrade!

            See the problem? Some machines would just make the OS look bad.

            My 400MHz G3 PowerBook is from 2000 and runs every new release faster than the last.

          • Re:Give me a break... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Steveftoth ( 78419 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @03:26PM (#9689738) Homepage
            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).
            • That's the way I always saw it, too.

              The classic Mac OS lasted what, 17 years? If Apple has plans of keeping the OS X codebase around that long, then it was wise for them to consider the power of future machines.

              To use a trivial example: windows still resize slow on a G5, right? But they're "double-buffered" or whatever--and we'll still see the benefits of that even more five years from now, when a machine comes out that can resize them in real time.

              Was it within Apple's grasp to make windows res

          • My goodness... (Score:3, Insightful)

            by FredFnord ( 635797 )
            You've run XP acceptably on 6 year old machines? Well, you are probably the only one in the world. Many PC-compatible 6 year old machines are limited in RAM to between 128 megs or so, which is not enough for XP. Basically, our three-year-old laptops (Dell business machiens, limited to 256 megs of RAM) are bad enough; I can't imagine what you'd do with a 400 mHz machine with 128 megs of RAM running XP. That's assuming it's still working; 2/3 of our three-year old (Dell) laptops have failed more than once
            • You've run XP acceptably on 6 year old machines? Well, you are probably the only one in the world. Many PC-compatible 6 year old machines are limited in RAM to between 128 megs or so, which is not enough for XP

              I have a 400 PIII(I think...) running XP with 512 RAM just fine. XP needs RAM. So does OSX. OSX was dead slow on my new powerbook with 256MB RAM before I bought a stick of 512MB.

              No computer (PC or Mac) should ship with less then 512MB of ram.
            • It's hard for me to blame Apple for not supporting the vintage 1997 (that would be seven years old, though some were sold in 1998) beige G3s, with their onboard SCSI, their ADB-connected keyboards and mice, and the (pathetic) Rage II+ graphics chips that many of them had. If you want them to work, you can get them to work, Apple just makes it clear that they're not supporting them.

              A bit of a digression, but Apple didn't always not support OSX on older G3s, and ultimately settled a class action lawsuit [macnn.com] reg

        • Re:Give me a break... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Ineffable 27 ( 203704 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @09:51AM (#9685499)
          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.
          • On an ibook 500mhz, i noticed a gui slowdown from 10.1 to 10.2 and a noticable gui speed gain from 10.2 to 10.3. I was looking forward to a similar speed gain for my upgraded beige DT, but alas, they decided to leave me behind be requiring built-in USB. I unsuccessfully tried both utilities to install 10.3 on unsupported macs.

            • Re:Give me a break... (Score:1, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward
              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:

              Beige G3/333 MT Rev 3
              640 Megs of Ram
              40 Gig HD & an 80 Gig HD - OS X is install on the 1

          • Re:Give me a break... (Score:3, Informative)

            by shawnce ( 146129 )
            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.
            • All I can say is, that hasn't been my experience. On any given machine, Panther is still less responsive than OS 9. I'm talking about window resizing, web pages loading, switching apps, etc. Unless, I guess, I run enough apps in OS 9 to slow it down to Panther-speed.

              Still, Panther is miles ahead of Jagwire in this area, and I look forward to yet more improvements in future releases. Now when I use Jagwire it seems like such a dog. Tiger sounds like it's on track to deliver another boost.
              • Weird. You sure you have enough RAM in your system?

                For me app to app switch is fast and doesn't bog down like it could in Mac OS 9 if one of the applications was busy working on something.

                Also with Safari things load and display faster then what I experience under Mac OS 9 or when using IE on Mac OS X.

                In regards to running enough apps... on Mac OS 9 you only need to run one application that doesn't do cooperative scheduling very well and everything is screwed (IE is one example when facing any type of ne
                • I have 640 MB!

                  Looking back on my comments, I overstated the case -- there is only a slight, though noticable difference between Panther and OS 9. But when I boot from my OS 9 partition it always blows me away how fast everything seems by comparison. Of course, in just about every other respect, I can't stand to use OS 9 since switching.

                  • Re:Give me a break... (Score:1, Interesting)

                    by zonker ( 1158 )
                    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...
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • 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.

          C'mon, give me a break here. I like Macs and I use Windows because I have to.

          When you upgrade from Windows 9x to Windows XP, yes, you need a better computer.

          But when you upgrade from MacOS 9 to MacOS X, you ALSO need a better computer! Let's see the typical OS9 machine running X -- it blows, in genera

          • Re:Give me a break... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by frankie ( 91710 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @01:29PM (#9688239) Journal
            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.
            • When you upgrade from Win2K to WinXP (and presumably to Longhorn or whatever), bloat increases and speed decreases.

              Actually, I've found XP to be faster and more compatible with older software than 2k. Upgrading from 2k to XP gave me definite speed increases.
      • Or they could just be smoke-and-mirroring some of the new features, knowing that there is some difficult coding ahead that may slow some things down in order to get them working properly.

        As the man said above, developers release, assuming nothing.

  • Missing the big picture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cycline3 ( 678496 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @10:53PM (#9682534) Homepage
    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

  • Perceived speed vs throughput (Score:5, Informative)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Monday July 12, 2004 @11:29PM (#9682732)
    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.

    • Re:Perceived speed vs throughput (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zhiwenchong ( 155773 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @01:01AM (#9683162)
      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 [arstechnica.com]) 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 [kernelthread.com].

      • Re:Perceived speed vs throughput (Score:5, Interesting)

        by John Newman ( 444192 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @02:00AM (#9683386)
        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.

      • Perceived speed is actually quite important; from the perspective of a personal computer user, it is quite possibly more important than actual throughput.

        This brings to mind my constant headache with my Windows notebook. The percieved speed of this (new in 2003) 2GHz IBM T70 (Windows 2000) seems slow, slow, slow, and I hate working on it. Just switching from one app to another seems to take forever. Just opening a command prompt can take forever, if I need to push on the Start menu.
        I don't care if it t

    • an example of this is that when 10.3 Panther came out they said something like "The spinning Beach-ball of Death shows up 50% less." The way they got that is to not show the beach-ball when a process is not responding unless you try to interact with it... People saw the hung cursor and perceived that the computer was slow, so now they don't see the cursor unless they need to know that the process isn't responding.

  • Tests (Score:3, Insightful)

    by whfsdude ( 592601 ) <whfsdude@gPASCALmail.com minus language> on Monday July 12, 2004 @11:53PM (#9682818) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Tests (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

  • OS X, keeps getting better (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Lost Supertone ( 754279 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @12:07AM (#9682905) Journal
    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?
    • It's because Apple is developing for their user base of esthetically correct, ergonomically aware individuals. MS is developing for the AOL/QVC/Clear Channel/Office Depot crowd.
    • Developers developers developers.

      Microsoft is successful because you can work and play on the same machine. Mac used to have the multimedia niche, but that gap has been closed. The most common lament I hear on /. (about Mac)is that there's no port of a specific game.

      Make a Mac-only game with the same 12-year old boy appeal as Halo, and you might sell yourself some Macs.

      This is just one reason.

      • OpenGL? No problem. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by revscat ( 35618 ) *

        The most common lament I hear on /. (about Mac)is that there's no port of a specific game. Make a Mac-only game with the same 12-year old boy appeal as Halo, and you might sell yourself some Macs.

        Wait.. are you saying that more games should be ported to the Mac, or that there should be games developed *solely* for the Mac? If the first, that's already taken care of: anything written in OpenGL works on the Mac. For example: Halo [apple.com].

        If the latter... that's kinda silly. No one would want to limit their mar

        • The latter is silly? It's Apple's business model. They have always been extremely proprietary. They sell apple-only hardware with apple-only software. They need to get a contract a gaming company to write an Mac-specific game that draws in new customers. If you poll Mac users why they bought the latest system, gaming isn't going to show up on the radar. If you want to game, you get a PC or a console.

          Once in a while you get a game with OpenGL graphics that's been ported to the Mac, but it's not the common

        • If the latter... that's kinda silly. No one would want to limit their market appeal. As great as I think Macs are, I would never expect a software company to limit their product to a single platform, no matter which platform we're talking about.

          Take a look at console games, its the exclusive games that sell the system. The only reason to buy a gamecube for instance is to be able to play mario/zelda or other gamecube exclusives. Sony is in a similar situation with the final fantasy franchise. If Halo wa

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • a graphics card question for those in-the-know (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bodrell ( 665409 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @01:13PM (#9688042) Journal
    The new Core Image [apple.com] features seem really cool. However, the ATI Rage M6 (?) card in my Powerbook G4 is not listed under supported graphics cards. They do say "Core Image automatically scales as appropriate for systems with older graphics cards, for compatibility with any Tiger-compatible Mac," but what does that really mean? Which of the Core Image features am I not going to be able to use? Will any of those unuseable features be necessary for rudimentary GUI operations?

    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.

    • Re:a graphics card question for those in-the-know (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Tuesday July 13, 2004 @03:29PM (#9689776) Journal
      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. [apple.com] Quartz Extreme relies on hardware support for GL_EXT_texture_rectangle [apple.com], 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 [sgi.com].

      Core Image is much more sophisticated, and levergaes the vertex and pixel fragment capabilities of an current generation OpenGL card.
      • Thanks--exactly the type of info I wanted to know.

        Guess this means I'll have to get a G5 tower when Tiger comes out. Darn ;)

        • Re:gracias (Score:3, Informative)

          by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 )
          Just to clarify, Core Image requires [apple.com] 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.
        • "Radeon Mobility" -> RageM6.

          Damn Internal code names...

          As for the usefullness of Core Image-- it looks like all the fancy image compositing functions of Quartz will finally be hardware accelerated. It will make fast eye candy possible, but it also has the potential to speed up photoshop and similar applications,

          And there's nothing wrong with eye candy. If it's "free" and doesn't interfere with normal workflow, it can enhance the usability of the interface. I'd be willing to bet that NextStep's opaq
        • You're absolutely wrong about Core Image. It's not just there for eye candy effects. It will greatly increase performance. Read this [apple.com] page.

          Until now, harnessing the power of the GPU required in-depth knowledge of pixel-level programming. Core Image allows developers to easily leverage the GPU for blistering-fast image processing that can eliminate rendering time delays. Effects and transitions can be expressed with a few lines of code. Core Image handles the rest, optimizing the path to the GPU. The result

      • How about my 1st gen iBook G4 12" 800 Mhz G4? Is it supported by Core Image?
  • 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 hav

  • And the fact that it is equaling benchmarks of the non-debug-mode Panther should make it clear.

    Debug code is always slower.

  • "Could we see a similar performance improvement as we did upgrading from Jaguar to Panther?"

    Am I the only one who never saw the vaunted improvement from Jaguar to Panther?

    While a few operations do seem to happen marginally faster, my Sawtooh G4/466, since upgrading to Panther, seems in fact more likely to give me the spinning beach ball, and is more prone to throwing a tantrum and not switch between applications while one of them is exercising a particularly trying task (hello, Gausian Blur in Photosho
    • As a general rule, anytime I upgrade to the next version of any OS, I have been grateful when it did not slow things down, despite the vendor's claim to the contrary.
    • Panther doesn't like being squeezed for space. If you haven't maxed-out the RAM on your system, you probably ought to look into it.

      My G4-450 is significantly more responsive with 10.3 than it was with 10.2. Actually, even my original iBook G3-300 was (marginally) faster with 10.3 for many things. But both of those systems have the maximum amount of RAM I could get in them.

      One other thing I've heard is that some folks had performance problems after upgrading, but a clean install was smoother. I have no id

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