[vharris528]

I have a 933mhz G4 Powermac with 1.25gb of memory and leopard is painfully slow. All user interfaces are slow. Will definately be investigating a new mac. I guess after almost 6yrs of use it's about time.

[DigitalEl]

Leopard was pokey at first, but that was while Time Machine was doing its first big copy and Spotlight was indexing. The next day, Leopard felt the same - maybe a little faster - than Tiger.

Leopard's install, however, was the slowest of the big cats for me, especially on the G5. It went quicker (duh!) on my C2D.

[peeb]

So, I got my Leopard disc this evening - did an upgrade install, and have to say that I love it. Spotlight is still indexing, and it is already snappier than Tiger on my 1.67 PB - very, very happy. Time machine is very cool, and a couple of small things I've noticed is that my USB externals come up very quickly - I wonder if there are new USB drivers?
I had a frightened moment when I thought my printers had been hosed, but only printers connected show up in the options now - very cool.
Safari three rocks - very fast. My only complaint is how big it is - I lost about 5 gb over my Tiger installation...

[mjankor]

I thought Leopard was slower than Tiger for the first few hours of use (After the indexing finished) but now that I've been using it for a few days it's feeling faster. Very subjective but some stuff is definitely faster.

[Cadaver]

Another subjective impression after using it since Friday afternoon - on my 2.66GHz Mac Pro w/ 6GB of RAM, I believe Leopard to be overall faster than Tiger. Perhaps its the multithreaded Finder (doesn't lock everything up wait for a slow iDisk, etc), perhaps its all the under-the-hood changes, but whatever the cause(s), I think its running smoother. Safari and Omniweb are fast, the three iWork apps seem to be happy, Nisus Writer Express zips right along, and Parallels - while the Windows virtual machine seems the same - the full-screen switching cube effect and other eye candy is way more fluid than it ever was on 10.4.

Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the performance.

Now, there are still a few bugs to be worked out, but hopefully we wont have to wait too long.

[FastAMX79]

Originally Posted by mattcass 

Good to hear! We have the same computer. Although I'm still hesitant. I worry when my computer is only 133 MHz above the minimum requirements...

Have you tried all the features? The dock/stacks/anything that's graphic intense is smooth?

Sorry so long to get back, have not been on-line, but yes, the dock, stacks and other graphical items work great! Once in a while it will burp, but for the most part everything is cool. The menu bar is semi transparent, the shadows look sharp, and other stuff like the dashboard splash work like a charm!

But I know a RAM upgrade and faster HDD would help to speed it up more

[JustinHoMi]

I have a Mac Mini (1.5ghz, 512MB ram). Some things are faster, and some are slower. The main problem is that certain things "pause" for a while. Say, I have a couple of windows open, and I click on one in the background... occassionally there is a multi-second pause before the other window comes up.

[peeb]

That's because you need more RAM.

[JustinHoMi]

No, it's not a thrashing problem. This happens before it starts to really utilize swap.

[peeb]

I don't want to sound like a dick, but that machine would be significantly faster with more RAM.

[sedlacek]

I thought my MBP felt a tiny bit snappier.....

*******--> Tiger <-- ******
Results 110.57
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.10 (8R2232)
Physical RAM 3072 MB
Model MacBookPro2,2
Drive Type ST9160823AS
CPU Test 118.13
Thread Test 223.89
Memory Test 124.01
Quartz Graphics Test 124.26
OpenGL Graphics Test 208.87
User Interface Test 306.70
Disk Test 38.15

*******--> Leopard <-- ******
Results 115.65
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5 (9A581)
Physical RAM 3072 MB
Model MacBookPro2,2
Drive Type ST9160823AS
CPU Test 134.84
Thread Test 199.37
Memory Test 138.81
Quartz Graphics Test 181.86
User Interface Test 302.70
Disk Test 36.08

[aehaas]

MBP 2.4 on battery after restart, 10.4.10:

Results 99.43
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.10 (8R2218)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro3,1
Drive Type ST9160823AS
CPU Test 108.91
GCD Loop 270.03 14.23 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 134.83 3.20 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 70.28 2.32 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 87.88 15.30 Mops/sec
Thread Test 237.83
Computation 217.31 4.40 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 262.62 11.30 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 143.05
System 130.09
Allocate 111.81 410.61 Kalloc/sec
Fill 136.87 6654.70 MB/sec
Copy 146.84 3032.84 MB/sec
Stream 158.86
Copy 148.36 3064.26 MB/sec
Scale 148.33 3064.54 MB/sec
Add 171.59 3655.17 MB/sec
Triad 170.40 3645.17 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 142.21
Line 151.62 10.09 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 191.06 57.04 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 179.17 14.60 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 164.04 4.14 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 85.81 5.37 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 139.74
Spinning Squares 139.74 177.27 frames/sec
User Interface Test 265.71
Elements 265.71 1.22 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 31.18
Sequential 50.56
Uncached Write 26.65 16.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 81.40 46.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 52.93 15.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 95.98 48.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 22.54
Uncached Write 6.93 0.73 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 75.72 24.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 87.88 0.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 117.44 21.79 MB/sec [256K blocks]

On 10.5, same conditions:

Results 110.35
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5 (9A581)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro3,1
Drive Type ST9160823AS
CPU Test 137.81
GCD Loop 281.21 14.82 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 134.44 3.19 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 110.81 3.66 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 111.02 19.33 Mops/sec
Thread Test 170.12
Computation 169.84 3.44 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 170.40 7.33 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 156.77
System 158.79
Allocate 213.61 784.44 Kalloc/sec
Fill 136.47 6635.64 MB/sec
Copy 145.26 3000.22 MB/sec
Stream 154.81
Copy 144.93 2993.46 MB/sec
Scale 143.99 2974.82 MB/sec
Add 167.32 3564.31 MB/sec
Triad 166.18 3555.06 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 196.04
Line 181.57 12.09 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 245.70 73.35 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 196.89 16.05 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 185.55 4.68 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 183.19 11.46 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 132.67
Spinning Squares 132.67 168.29 frames/sec
User Interface Test 297.11
Elements 297.11 1.36 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 35.82
Sequential 67.94
Uncached Write 69.03 42.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 80.55 45.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 47.33 13.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 92.20 46.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 24.32
Uncached Write 7.55 0.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 83.88 26.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 85.58 0.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 118.48 21.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]

It is noticeably faster to me as are some programs as Safari.

aehaas

[tkmd]

I find it odd that the general feed back is that the system feels snappier in Leopard but the numbers indicate otherwise (or minimal improvement). I personally thought that the UI interface and the quartz / open gl numbers would improve- but again that is not the case.


I do believe that it feels snappier.

[Judge_Fire]

PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz with 1.5 GB RAM

The UI, including scrolling is teh Snappy now- everything is more responsive, this is the fastest this Mac has ever been, user experience-wise.

The biggest single improvement has been Google Earth, which now flies with no hiccups. OpenGL got better, I guess.

[tkmd]

The thing that I found to be kinda amazing about leopard is this : I just added my documents folder to my g4 laptop (AL 1.5/ 1.5 Gb Ram). Its a large folder (12 GB) with many documents including .pdfs that have 50+ pages in them. In addition, I'm installing iphoto 08. The cpu has been pinned @ 100 percent for about an hour - I assume that its spotlighting the documents that I have just imported. But I really have not "felt " a system slow down overall! This is on a G4 mind you. So far I am impressed with the internals of Leopard and disgusted by the external GUI.

[CheesePuff]

Mac mini Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Hitachi 200 GB 7200 RPM HDD. Feels faster doing just about anything on 10.5.0 compared to 10.4.10. Lots of applications will launch faster (i.e. iCal, Safari, Mail, etc.) and everything else is the same. Nothing feels slower.

[tkmd]

The engineers must has multithreaded more apps and offloaded more stuff to the video card. Funny if I go to the system profiler and go to the graphics section core image now states "hardware accelerated" as opposed to "supported" in Tiger. I dont know if this is a case of different words being used to describe "supported".

I wonder if there is anyone running leopard that has "supported " by core image in the system profiler.

[zaghahzag]

its probably snappier on Multicore machines because of the improved threading. Basically there's less times when the machine is lagging because a few processes are fighting for resources.

[peeb]

Originally Posted by tkmd 

I find it odd that the general feed back is that the system feels snappier in Leopard but the numbers indicate otherwise (or minimal improvement). I personally thought that the UI interface and the quartz / open gl numbers would improve- but again that is not the case.

I do believe that it feels snappier.

This is one of the issues with benchmarking - Apple is very fanatical about only making optimizations that improve user experience, not improve benchmarks.

[tkmd]

Just wanted to say that the speed increases that I feel are on my g4, which is of course a single core machine. I have not yet put leopard my my MP until .1 or .2 slew of bug fixes come out.

[Don Pickett]

After a few hours 10.5 feels noticeably faster on my single 1.8 G5.

[Simon]

On my 2.4 GHz MBP Leopard definitely feels faster than Tiger. Just like Tiger felt faster on my last PB G4 than Panther. No surprise here.

[tkmd]

What I would be very interested in is looking at benchmarks (app performance, gaming etc) in leopard vs Tiger on a G4 versus core duo and mp pro ( both quad core and 8 core). I would really like to see if the leopard has any gains in the intel multiprocessor ....

[Don Pickett]

Leopard still feels fast. I don't know if it's because Apple has been steadily optimizing their code base, or whether they've finally shifted the bulk of the GUI over to the GPU, but the interface is noticeably faster than Tiger's.