engadget test SL, CPU performance goes up abit, graphic performance goes down alot

[clevin]

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/26/snow-leopard-review/

[Amdahl]

Well, make that 299 improvements!

[t0mat0]

That's the one thing that jumps out from the initial benchmarks from the reviews i've seen - CNET's here. Will be interesting to see what Apple pushes once it's released and they add more benchmarks to the apple.com site.

CNET -
iTunes encoding - 10.5 just better
Photoshop - 10.6 just better
QT multimediate multitasking test - 10.5 much quicker
Cinebench - 10.5 just better




Most reviews seem to be saying that it's faster in quite a few areas though.
Engadget - Finder seems "zippy". Worth quoting what's said below the graphic -

As measured by XBench, Snow Leopard affects every Mac a little differently, but the basic outcome is the same: raw CPU performance goes up slightly, while the graphics numbers go down -- OpenGl performance in particular takes a big hit. We're not sure if this is due to our version of XBench not playing nicely with Snow Leopard or something else entirely, but we didn't notice any slowdowns while we actually worked -- or played a little casual CoD4. We're not deep into the benchmark scene, so we'd wait for some hardcore marks to hit before you race into fanboy battle with these numbers -- for now, just know that Snow Leopard certainly "feels" a little snappier than Leopard.

[zerostar]

I had the same results when testing a few builds ago... I wonder how games will respond.

[sadatkarim]

Xbench. Software that hasn't been updated since 2006, before Leopard even came out.

[parapup]

That they managed to break so many things with a minor upgrade of the OS - is simply astonishing.

Wonder how the software developers at Unsanity feel - Apple broke the theming for them with Leopard with a promise of Core UI in SL which is still unfulfilled and as a bonus they broke APE again! (I would not want to be in their shoes.)

Sounds like they still have a lot many things they need to mess around with to get to a stable API that works predictably across OS releases. They could afford this breakage as long as they are not in the enterprise OS league.

On the brighter side it is only $29 and it is snappier - so stick to your "close to stock" setup and enjoy I suppose.

[clevin]

Originally Posted by sadatkarim

Xbench. Software that hasn't been updated since 2006, before Leopard even came out.

im not sure its related, and not sure if your understanding of how xbench works is correct.

Originally Posted by parapup

That they managed to break so many things with a minor upgrade of the OS - is simply astonishing.

for end users, there is little apple can offer with more OSX in the near future. Its cheap, $29, but the effect users can feel is probably just like that, $29 and cheap.

But I dont blame apple, there are things about OSX to be done, but I can't see apple do much about them: ridiculous flash performance, few game options, limited hardware supports.

for developers, i dont know, apple is offering something, then they are fumbling something as well, guess because not many new developers care, so apple can push it out without worrying about performance degradation?

[melchior]

under the hood upgrade, not minor upgrade... a point update is a minor upgrade.

Originally Posted by parapup

That they managed to break so many things with a minor upgrade of the OS - is simply astonishing.

[localoid]

Originally Posted by sadatkarim

Xbench. Software that hasn't been updated since 2006, before Leopard even came out.

Xbench scores should always be taken with a grain of salt...

Quoting from the article:

"We're not sure if this is due to our version of XBench not playing nicely with Snow Leopard or something else entirely, but we didn't notice any slowdowns while we actually worked -- or played a little casual CoD4. We're not deep into the benchmark scene, so we'd wait for some hardcore marks to hit before you race into fanboy battle with these numbers -- for now, just know that Snow Leopard certainly "feels" a little snappier than Leopard."

[str1f3]

I can't say for others but I've actually had better performance espescially in online play for some reason. I can't speak from knowledge but from others I have read in this forum, they claim that you won't see proper testing with these versions of XBench.

[parapup]

Originally Posted by melchior

under the hood upgrade, not minor upgrade... a point update is a minor upgrade.

Still - it is not like a whole lot was changed under the hood. Many agree Windows 7 is to Windows Vista like SL is to Leopard and Win 7 is not breaking anything.

But let's assume a lot did change under the hood - the fact that they need to change so much under the hood of a "modern" OS from 2009, without breaking user land stuff - it says something.

It is a proof that Apple isn't paying attention to developer's needs if they cannot give predictable APIs for applications like Growl, APE which break with each upgrade. From a developer's standpoint - this is not good. And what is not good for developers cannot be good for Apple. (Unsanity has not been able to get their main apps to Leopard for so long - and they are not going to be able to do that for SL - pretty bad that Apple keeps ignoring them.)

Apple should get their head out and do something about the most "broke with upgrade" apps - the ones using InputManager, themes like Unsanity and what not and give them a set-in-stone, frozen, predictable API.

[t0mat0]

I guess the benchmarking will be pretty fluid. This is 10.6.0 afterall. Once developers start using the tools Apple has for performance improvements, things will get better.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by parapup

Apple should get their head out and do something about the most "broke with upgrade" apps - the ones using InputManager, themes like Unsanity and what not and give them a set-in-stone, frozen, predictable API.

It's not that the APIs Unsanity is using change constantly... it's that Unsanity isn't using APIs. They're messing around with undocumented internals of apps. Likewise with Input Managers; the *intent* of the Input Manager API is to allow for multilingual text input, it's only through a particular detail of how that's implemented that people use it to hack apps.

Messing the internals of apps cannot be supported in a stable way, and no system does so.

[parapup]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man

It's not that the APIs Unsanity is using change constantly... it's that Unsanity isn't using APIs. They're messing around with undocumented internals of apps. Likewise with Input Managers; the *intent* of the Input Manager API is to allow for multilingual text input, it's only through a particular detail of how that's implemented that people use it to hack apps.

Messing the internals of apps cannot be supported in a stable way, and no system does so.

I understand that - My point was that the fact that such applications exist and have no way but to use the undocumented internals to achieve what they want to and Apple still does not hand them a supported API to do that - for years, is problematic.

If the apps need to use undocumented internals, Apple needs to work with them to get them what they need in a supported way. The fact that they continue to ignore anything other than their strict interests is unhealthy for them and their developers alike.

For Windows the situation is far more tolerable - there have been supported ways of DLL hooking since long, same goes for theming APIs - uxtheme etc. Microsoft rarely broke APIs and that worked very well from them and their developers - Apple needs to start caring more about developers.

[Ritsuka]

xBench is a joke, on the opengl test it gives higher marks to the intel gma 950 than to the nvidia 8600 on my macbook / macbook pro under Leopard.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by parapup

For Windows the situation is far more tolerable - there have been supported ways of DLL hooking since long

Assuming I'm interpreting what you mean here correctly, there are supported APIs for doing it on OSX as well (DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH and related); doesn't make 'em safe.

same goes for theming APIs - uxtheme etc. Microsoft rarely broke APIs and that worked very well from them and their developers - Apple needs to start caring more about developers.

Do any developers other than Unsanity actually need theming APIs? Particularly *system* theming APIs rather than app theming? Catering to a particular niche could potentially be nice I suppose, but the APIs that *are* being added seem a lot more generally useful. Snow Leopard fixes quite a few developer API requests.

[Riemann Zeta]

Xbench is a terrible benchmarking tool: for me, it was never even consistent across Leopard 10.5.X updates. Those numbers seem to be pulled right out of the software's ass (if a computer program can have an ass). I have a feeling that XBench has serious incompatibilities with the NVIDIA Mac OS driver, because the OpenGL/Quartz UI numbers it gave my 8600M GT were always lower than the score given to the far older ATi X1600.

[parapup]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man

Assuming I'm interpreting what you mean here correctly, there are supported APIs for doing it on OSX as well (DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH and related); doesn't make 'em safe.



Do any developers other than Unsanity actually need theming APIs? Particularly *system* theming APIs rather than app theming? Catering to a particular niche could potentially be nice I suppose, but the APIs that *are* being added seem a lot more generally useful. Snow Leopard fixes quite a few developer API requests.

No loader paths are not APIs - it's just a mechanism to allow different DLLs to be loaded based on search path and order. I am talking about the hooks API. If you look at the bottom of that link - it works on all systems since Win 95 and is supported/safe.

About any other developers needing theming APIs - who knows. If Apple builds them Developers will come. It isn't like we only need one themer - competition is good.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by parapup

No loader paths are not APIs - it's just a mechanism to allow different DLLs to be loaded based on search path and order. I am talking about the hooks API. If you look at the bottom of that link - it works on all systems since Win 95 and is supported/safe.

Ah ok. That sounds like CGEventTap and kqueue on OSX. There's some expanded stuff in this area in Snow Leopard, but those should cover a lot of stuff.