Tiger speed?

[levil]

Hello everyone

Knowing that panthers are faster than tigers... )

...are we looking at a speed increase/decrease for tiger?

I am using a 867MHz G4 Powerbook with 640MB RAM and Panther is often draging its feet. (though I cannot say I am going easy on the thing If Tiger will not present any speed increase I would probably wait until my next notebook. (ie. as soon as Apple gets off its ... and makes some real improvements like dual core or G5. I just could not get my self to upgrade when I saw the last powerbook specs.)

If tiger is faster, I'll consider.

Anybody with upgrade experience? Did your system get faster?

thx

L

 

[shorty116]

well startup is now very fast...i'm on a ibook g3 700mhz and it starts up almost twice as fast. the apple programs also load faster (safari, pages, etc.). i havn't tested enought but i do know that azureus loads the plugins faster, before tiger i had to wait like 3-4 minutes for it to load and with tiger less than a minute. dunno about other non apple made apps... hope this helps.

 

[markoibook]

well startup is now very fast...i'm on a ibook g3 700mhz and it starts up almost twice as fast. the apple programs also load faster (safari, pages, etc.). i havn't tested enought but i do know that azureus loads the plugins faster, before tiger i had to wait like 3-4 minutes for it to load and with tiger less than a minute. dunno about other non apple made apps... hope this helps.

Funky - I too have a g3 700mhz iBook, and have been a bit worried as to whether my machine is up to Tiger. One question for you though - how do you find spotlight on your machine - is it snappy or is it quite sluggish?

Marko

 

[sparkleytone]

Tiger has the quickest UI we have seen in OS X yet. I would venture to say that it is as fast as its going to get. Tiger on my 1.2GHz G4 iBook feels as fast as OS9 did on my G3 600 iBook. However, do not expect this to translate to things other than 'look and feel' on anything besides a G5. Things such as encoding/compiling/folding/processorintensiveprocesses don't run any faster, as they already ran pretty much as fast as they could.

 

[shorty116]

spotlight is really fast, used it many times. longest search took about 3 seconds with 3500 search results. and much nicer than the finder search field!

 

[markoibook]

spotlight is really fast, used it many times. longest search took about 3 seconds with 3500 search results. and much nicer than the finder search field!

Awesome!!! Out of interest how much RAM/Hard Disk does your machine have??
I was a bit concerned about the speed of Tiger and Spotlight on a g3 ibook - but if its good - i may have to progress to Tiger next week!!!

 

[Pismo]

XBench

Here are my XBench 1.1.3 results for my PowerBook. I'm running OS 10.3.9 and I will run XBench again when I get Tiger. I hope XBench will show the results for Tiger accurately.

 

[carbonmotion]

very fast but also very buggy

tiger is very buggy and quartz 2d extreme is turned off by default.

 

[chibianh]

So far, I'm very satisfied with Tiger. Haven't run into any problems.. yet. Well, I had a problem with Virex, but that issue is resolved. It's much snappier than 10.3.9.. especially Safari. I'm on a 1.6ghz Power Mac with 1.5gb ram and radeon 9800 pro.

 

[gekko513]

Here are my XBench 1.1.3 results for my PowerBook. I'm running OS 10.3.9 and I will run XBench again when I get Tiger. I hope XBench will show the results for Tiger accurately.

XBench isnt't very accurate in general.

 

[Pismo]

XBench isnt't very accurate in general.

I ran the test several times and all of the results were pretty much the same. Is there another benchmark program that is more accurate? Thanks.

 

[ZaniCWB]

Ok, and...

tiger is very buggy and quartz 2d extreme is turned off by default.

Are you sure Quartz Extreme is turned off by default? And if so, how do you turn it on?

 

[Pismo]

Are you sure Quartz Extreme is turned off by default? And if so, how do you turn it on?

I think if your video card is not supported, QE will not work. If you have a supported video card it'll work.

 

[gekko513]

I ran the test several times and all of the results were pretty much the same. Is there another benchmark program that is more accurate? Thanks.

XBench isn't inaccurate in the sense that it doesn't report the same score when you run it several times, but in the sense that it doesn't take much change to the system to significantly change some of the results. Sometimes when you upgrade the OS or make other changes it will affect the XBench score and the change may not always correspond to the real world effects that you see. I don't know why exactly, but I suppose it could be because XBench only tests certain functions and those may not always be functions that are used by your favourite app.

I haven't actually experienced this myself with XBench because I only tried XBench once, but I do know from this forum that the XBench scores for equal hardware can vary a lot from system to system.

I don't know much about other benchmark tests, but I would suggest benchmarks that mean something to you. If you're into games you can check the frame rates before and after. If you do some content creation you can check how long certain tasks that you have to wait for take and then repeat with Tiger. If you are concerned with general snappiness of the UI, there will be no good benchmark except your own perception of it.

 

[jim.]

On the anandtech forums, some people are saying that they have to turn on 2D Extreme in the Quartz debugger and it isn't on by default. They don't mention if they are running the GM build or not, so we'll just have to see.

One guy hinted that on his FX5200, the system seemed the same or slower with 2D Extreme on. Maybe this is why Apple didn't have it on by default, or as stated above it isn't turned on for unsupported cards.

Anyone with Tiger and a 9600+ vid card able to confirm if 2D Extreme is on or off? You have to use the Quartz Debugger in the Tiger Devel tools to see.

Jim

 

[Pismo]

I just want to campare numbers between Panther and Tiger. I'm hoping that Tiger will be considerably faster than Panther. I'm going to look at the numbers to compare and get a feel of how much faster Tiger is.

 

[sparkleytone]

Quartz 2D Extreme != Quartz Extreme

Quartz Extreme works just as well as it always has and of course is turned on.

Quartz 2D Extreme is basically where EVERYTHING on screen is done on the GPU, including text rendering. Apple has been working on this since the beginning of Tiger, but either its not stable enough or they are waiting for something. Apple never really touted this as a feature of Tiger. Being that it deprecates QuickDraw, they may simply be waiting for Tiger to achieve critical mass and for major applications to update properly.

P.S. Q2DE requires a CoreImage-capable GPU and can be turned on using QuartzDebug from the Developer Tools.

 

[basworth]

G5 64bit speed increases

I have a dual G5 2.5 and was wondering what kind of speed increases i would notice over a non 64-bit processor computer, in all non64-bit apps (ilife, finder, the os)

thanks

 

[mad jew]

I have a dual G5 2.5 and was wondering what kind of speed increases i would notice over a non 64-bit processor computer, in all non64-bit apps (ilife, finder, the os)

thanks

I'm pretty sure it's similar to the dual-processor debate in that the apps not written to take advantage of the technology show no speed improvements. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's the 64-bit aspect of the G5s that makes them so much fast than the G4s with respect to 32-bit apps but rather the fact they have faster clock speeds, front side buses etc.

I'm more than happy to be proved wrong though, I'm not all that confident on my reasoning.

 

[gekko513]

I have a dual G5 2.5 and was wondering what kind of speed increases i would notice over a non 64-bit processor computer, in all non64-bit apps (ilife, finder, the os)

thanks

Probably very, very little or none.

Even with 64-bits apps 64-bit computing doesn't increase the speed of most applications because there are few regular computational problems that need to work on numbers larger than 32 bits.

Some kinds of encoding and decoding can benefit from 64-bit computing. For a non64-bit app to take advantage of the 64-bit processor, I imagine that the system architecture must be built so that the app calls a framework function that in return communicates with some 64-bit OS daemon process to do the computation. I'm not sure if that is done to much extent in Panther and Tiger.

 

[SPUY767]

XBench isnt't very accurate in general.

I second that, I was gonna post my scores where his machine beat my dual 2.5 in about half of the tests, but it's no matter. Tiger isn't buggy, and it'a a ton faster, 30-50% increases in most 3D games.

 

[daveL]

Probably very, very little or none.

Even with 64-bits apps 64-bit computing doesn't increase the speed of most applications because there are few regular computational problems that need to work on numbers larger than 32 bits.

Some kinds of encoding and decoding can benefit from 64-bit computing. For a non64-bit app to take advantage of the 64-bit processor, I imagine that the system architecture must be built so that the app calls a framework function that in return communicates with some 64-bit OS daemon process to do the computation. I'm not sure if that is done to much extent in Panther and Tiger.

Both Panther and Tiger have 64-bit math libraries that are specific to the G5. There's no daemon involved. There's nothing to prevent a 32-bit G5 program from using the 64-bit math instructions available on the G5.

 

[shorty116]

Awesome!!! Out of interest how much RAM/Hard Disk does your machine have??
I was a bit concerned about the speed of Tiger and Spotlight on a g3 ibook - but if its good - i may have to progress to Tiger next week!!!

I just installed a new hd before installing tiger, got 80 Gb HD (4200 rpm same as the old one was) and loaded with 640 MB Ram and tiger runs like hell. i definetly recommend tiger to all g3 users with 700 mhz.

 

[markoibook]

I just installed a new hd before installing tiger, got 80 Gb HD (4200 rpm same as the old one was) and loaded with 640 MB Ram and tiger runs like hell. i definetly recommend tiger to all g3 users with 700 mhz.

Did u install the hard drive yourself? Was is it much work?
I only have 384MB RAM and 20GB Hard Drive - hopefully it will still be faster with Tiger tho - I know that Jaguar to Panther certainly brought a speed increase!

 

[gekko513]

Both Panther and Tiger have 64-bit math libraries that are specific to the G5. There's no daemon involved. There's nothing to prevent a 32-bit G5 program from using the 64-bit math instructions available on the G5.

Aah, I guess you're right. I was confused by the memory constraint that requires a 32-bit app to use a separate 64-bit process if it wants to have an address space larger than 4GB.

It makes sense that an app running in 32-bit mode can only use 32-bit pointers but can still issue 64-bits instructions, because the instruction opcodes don't conflict with each other. Is this correct?