My recently acquired Powerbook G4 12" has happily been running Tiger but this weekend I decided to partition the drive, add Leopard and make some direct comparisons between the two.
Initially, things didn't look so great for Leopard as Geekbench reported a roughly 100 point decrease but we know how unreliable benchmarks can be, so I'd use real world tests as a better comparison.
An important caveat here is my Powerbook is running in Reduced mode (to keep noise down until I find a replacement fan) - so the 1.5Ghz G4 is running at half speed.
Going online with InterWebPPC, I measured the average page loading times:
Tiger
MacRumors PowerPC - 14.2 seconds
BBC News - 14.4 seconds
Leopard
MacRumors PowerPC - 12.9 seconds
BBC News - 13.4 seconds
These results surprised me - Leopard clearly has some advantages in it's codebase for surfing.
Next up was video playback with CPU measured from Menu Meters, the test file a 360P h264 mp4 and CPU use taken at the 30 second mark.
Tiger
mplayer - 41%
mplayer (optimised) - 32%
ffplay - 30%
coreplayer - 22%
quicktime 7.6 - 65%
Leopard
mplayer - 54%
mplayer (optimised) - 42%
ffplay - 41%
coreplayer - 30%
quicktime 7.7 - 78%
Again, this was surprising as I expected Leopard to have more efficient video capabilities.
Finally, playing 360P video from the Youtube proxy site, Iteroni, via OneWindowBrowser and passing the video URL to a custom script that uses yt-dlp and ffplay from PPCMC7.
Figures are seconds to video playback starting and CPU use at 10 seconds.
Tiger
28.15 seconds 51%
Leopard
27.65 seconds 48%
A curious result - Tiger has more efficient playback but it seems Leopard has the edge when the video source is streaming.
Leopard's real advantage is levering QuickTime 7.7 into online video playback as it is newer and more HTML5 compliant - at Reduced speed on the Powerbook with Tiger any attempt to play Youtube in browser is far from ideal with buffering and frame drops, however, QuickTime on Leopard is a vast improvement and playback in browser is possible even at Reduced speed - with OneWindowBrowser and Iteroni being a great combination.
On this particular Mac, I'd say Leopard is the better fit after all.
Initially, things didn't look so great for Leopard as Geekbench reported a roughly 100 point decrease but we know how unreliable benchmarks can be, so I'd use real world tests as a better comparison.
An important caveat here is my Powerbook is running in Reduced mode (to keep noise down until I find a replacement fan) - so the 1.5Ghz G4 is running at half speed.
Going online with InterWebPPC, I measured the average page loading times:
Tiger
MacRumors PowerPC - 14.2 seconds
BBC News - 14.4 seconds
Leopard
MacRumors PowerPC - 12.9 seconds
BBC News - 13.4 seconds
These results surprised me - Leopard clearly has some advantages in it's codebase for surfing.
Next up was video playback with CPU measured from Menu Meters, the test file a 360P h264 mp4 and CPU use taken at the 30 second mark.
Tiger
mplayer - 41%
mplayer (optimised) - 32%
ffplay - 30%
coreplayer - 22%
quicktime 7.6 - 65%
Leopard
mplayer - 54%
mplayer (optimised) - 42%
ffplay - 41%
coreplayer - 30%
quicktime 7.7 - 78%
Again, this was surprising as I expected Leopard to have more efficient video capabilities.
Finally, playing 360P video from the Youtube proxy site, Iteroni, via OneWindowBrowser and passing the video URL to a custom script that uses yt-dlp and ffplay from PPCMC7.
Figures are seconds to video playback starting and CPU use at 10 seconds.
Tiger
28.15 seconds 51%
Leopard
27.65 seconds 48%
A curious result - Tiger has more efficient playback but it seems Leopard has the edge when the video source is streaming.
Leopard's real advantage is levering QuickTime 7.7 into online video playback as it is newer and more HTML5 compliant - at Reduced speed on the Powerbook with Tiger any attempt to play Youtube in browser is far from ideal with buffering and frame drops, however, QuickTime on Leopard is a vast improvement and playback in browser is possible even at Reduced speed - with OneWindowBrowser and Iteroni being a great combination.
On this particular Mac, I'd say Leopard is the better fit after all.
