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Leopard performance on G4 Powerbooks (early reports: excellent)

R

rpp3po

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 16, 2003
171
0
Germany
It won't probably be any faster at number crunching or encoding tasks, but UI speed and flow is unbelievable! With only 768 MB RAM Leopard delivers absolutely instant UI experience anywhere. That's what I wanted my user interface to be like ever since BeOS! Even my 3Ghz 2 GB RAM Vista PC still has to access the hard disk sometimes when popping up the start menu or windows. As if this couldn't be done better in times of Ghz machines.............. Nothing, not a fraction of a second lag anywhere with Leopard. Even much better than Tiger, which was also fast, but at least on old machines you had sometimes to wait a second for a folder's contents to appear (like "Utilities" when you hadn't used it for a long time).

Additionally Safari 3 is the fastest browser I have ever used (page rendering speed). Again faster than Firefox on my 3 Ghz machine. Safari stutters a little bit while scrolling though, that must be fixed. It didn't do that on Tiger.

All this on top of this gorgeous looking UI... Great work, Apple!
 
Thanks for the report. I'm going to install first on my PBG4 1.25 so your report in encouraging.
 
rpp3po said:
With only 768 MB RAM Leopard delivers absolutely instant UI experience anywhere.
Click to expand...

What kind of PowerBook? Titanium, Aluminum? I have a 1 GHz iBook, but bus speed is only 133 MHz and G4 L2 cache is only 256 KB + only 32 MB ATI 9200 graphics.
 
This is definately exciting news. I'm still a bit skeptical about installing this on my 1.25ghz powerbook because I feel that the processor will be taxed so much more while performing the same tasks I do on Tiger. I do want to hear of more G4 reports
 
It's a 12" Al, 133 Mhz FSB.

I think Leopard adjusts to your specs to a certain degree. On thing I noticed, for example: my menubar is not transparent on the PowerBook, but it is on the iMac.

Even PDF coverflow works without the tiniest bit of stuttering. It's unbelievable! On a 1 Ghz machine!! I don't find my experiences reflected in most available reviews, yet. They just focus on features and seem all testing on rather fast machines. In my opinion the low level advancements under the hood are much more outstanding than anything else. Man, you can flip through 30 PDF's fullscreen in less than 10 secs in Quickview! I just went through my bank records to find a transaction.

Just wow!
 
rpp3po said:
It's a 12" Al, 133 Mhz FSB.

I think Leopard adjusts to your specs to a certain degree. On thing I noticed, for example: my menubar is not transparent on the PowerBook, but it is on the iMac.
Click to expand...

does your computer support core image? could that be related?
 
This is good news, I was probably going to put leopard on my 1.33Ghz powerbook eventually but I will for sure now since I have been hearing mostly good reports about it.
 
It does support Core Image and Quartz extreme, so the adjustment must be related to something else:

GeForce FX Go5200 32MB:

Chipset Model: GeForce FX Go5200 32MB
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
VRAM (Total): 32 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0329
Revision ID: 0x00a3
ROM Revision: 2069.1
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1024 x 768
Depth: 32-bit Color
Built-In: Yes
Core Image: Hardware Accelerated
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Display Connector:
Status: No display connected
 
rpp3po said:
It's a 12" Al, 133 Mhz FSB.

I think Leopard adjusts to your specs to a certain degree. On thing I noticed, for example: my menubar is not transparent on the PowerBook, but it is on the iMac.
Click to expand...

Okay, almost the same specs then! Only difference is that you have the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 and I the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200. If you say that it runs great on your PowerBook, then my iBook should be no problem.

So does it show the reflection in the Dock on your PowerBook? Or is that too disabled?
 
I wasn't going to install it on my Powerbook but if you think its better I will, thank goodness I will have the family pack!
 
rpp3po said:
It does support Core Image and Quartz extreme, so the adjustment must be related to something else:
Click to expand...

Yes, that's strange. Your card does indeed support hardware accelerated Core Image. My iBook ATI 9200 does not, however. So the fast UI on your PowerBook could still be because you have hardware accelerated Core Image. I will have to see how fast the interface will be without.
 
The Man said:
So does it show the reflection in the Dock on your PowerBook? Or is that too disabled?
Click to expand...

It does. But I don't think it's computationally very demanding. It shows just a cropped area of your window upside down and filtered to be a little lighter, scrolling smoothly into the opposite directions of your movement. You need just simple 2D arithmetics to accomplish that. Maybe higher spec'ed machines show fancier effects here (like actually 3D rendered mirrored traffic lights instead of plain upside down versions).
 
quick question: what's the difference between "supported" and "hardware accelerated?"
 

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Yay, this is really encouraging. Another G4 PowerBook owner here, but with 1.25GHz and 1GB memory! Old and outdated specs, I know, but due for a makeover -- I'll replace the 80GB HD and do a clean install of Leopard.
 
As before, don't be disappointed if it is slow right after installing. That's just spotlight. After that is done it will take off.
 
Original poster - did you do a new clean install, or an upgrade or an archive and install?

I have a similar 12-inch Powerbook. Same graphics card, 1.5 GHZ G4, and 1.25 GB of memory.

Sounds promising! I was going to keep Tiger on the Powerbook ,but you make it sound like Leopard won't slow it down, so I may go ahead!

Thanks
 
I never do updates. Because OS X lacks proper uninstalling mechanisms any OS upgrade is a welcome opportunity get rid of the junk in the System and Library folders. I did archive and install and copied Address Book, iPhoto, and iTunes data manually to the new system.

Before installation I made sure that the filesystem hadn't collected too many excess fragments over time using hfsdebug. I defragmented about 12 large files by duplicating them and deleting the original and freed about 60 GB of HD space. You probably can't get any closer to a fresh install.
 
Hmmm....thats nice to hear but how does the 1ghz PPC compared to 2ghz Intel?
 
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