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Slower on a Power Mac

We've been used to better performance as Mac OS X evolved from the Public Beta through version 10.3. With Tiger (10.4), that ended. And with Leopard, if these benchmark results are a fair indicator, there's a real performance hit.

Overall performance results for the Power Mac G5 with 1.25 GB of RAM show Tiger as the fastest with a score of 1013, 32-bit Leopard in second place (over 10% slower at 898), and 64-bit Leopard trailing that by an additional 5% (853). 64-bit Leopard tends to lag because 64-bit commands are larger and thus take longer to load under PowerPC architecture.

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Faster on an Intel Mac

As widely expected, Leopard appears to be optimized for the Intel x86 architecture. 32-bit Leopard is overall a bit slower than Tiger (on the order of 3%), and 64-bit Leopard is the speed champion overall (6-7%) and in three of four benchmarks.

Looking at specific benchmarks, 64-bit OS X 10.5 is 15% faster than Tiger for integer performance (32-bit Leopard is about 2% slower), 5% faster for floating point math (32-bit Leopard trails by 3%), and 5% faster for stream performance (with 32-bit Leopard trailing Tiger by a mere 0.7%).

Memory performance is where Tiger trumps both versions of Leopard: both versions of 10.5 are about 5.5% slower on Intel hardware.

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Leopard on Unsupported Macs

We have read several reports of people running Mac OS X 10.5 on G4 Macs slower than 867 MHz, even though the installer refuses to function on these systems (not even the dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4).

James Steele wrote:That's cool, but what kind of G5 and 1.25 GB of RAM?? Seriously that's pretty anemica in terms of RAM for OSX. I'd like to see two machines at 4GB of RAM. My dual 2.3ghz PPC machine seems pretty much the same as Tiger.