Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Review

Performance in Tiger

The one thing that excited me more than anything else about getting and using Tiger was that everyone had lauded OS X for being the one OS that had improved in performance with every iteration.  Being a Windows user, this was a complete reversal of my thinking - as each new iteration of Windows was an excuse for me to build a ridiculously powerful machine by my old standards, to feel even remotely at home under the latest version of Windows. 

But it would appear that I may have missed the boat, as performance in Tiger is a mixed bag.  I'd say that overall performance in Tiger is an improvement over Panther, but there are some definite exceptions to the rule. 

The biggest exception, from my perspective, is the fact that menu highlights always seem to just barely trail my mouse pointer in Tiger, whereas Panther kept up very well.  At first, I thought that I was just imagining things, but then I set up a G5 test bed with two identical hard drives; the only difference being one drive had Panther while the other had Tiger.  After booting them back to back, it's clear that my worries were founded. Tiger's menu highlight does seem to be slightly more laggy than Panther's.

Other areas of performance show definite improvements in Tiger, but what's interesting to me is that subjective performance impacts vary greatly (for me) depending on the type of system that I'm using.  For this article, I used Tiger on four different modern day Macs: two Powermac G5 systems (dual 2.5GHz and dual 2.0GHz), one Mac mini and a 15" PowerBook G4. 

Performance using Spotlight is pretty impressive on all three systems on which I've tried Tiger. On the mini and the PowerBook G4, it is definitely slower than the G5, thanks to their slower hard drives, but it is still fairly quick to search and bring up results.  Spotlight on the G5 is lightning quick, although the results don't all pop up at the same time. Within a second, you have your entire list of search hits at the upper right hand corner of your screen.  What's interesting here is that because Spotlight performance isn't something that I could quantify in Panther (since Spotlight obviously wasn't a feature of Panther), the PowerBook and mini feel slower in Tiger to me than they were in Panther.  It's not because the OS is actually slower, but it's because my usage models have changed with Tiger - thus, putting more emphasis on fast hard disk performance.  I'd also say that there's a pretty noticeable performance difference in Spotlight between the mini's 5400RPM 2.5" hard drive in comparison to my older PowerBook's 4200RPM 2.5" hard drive. 

I/O performance appears to have improved by a noticeable amount in Tiger, especially on the G5. Disk accesses seem quicker, although I'm not certain if that's improvements to the disk side of I/O or if it is better at memory management, caching, or what.  Regardless, those two areas of performance definitely improved. 

There was a noticeable improvement in performance on the G5, with the biggest improvements being in UI performance.  The UI seems a lot more responsive (especially at higher resolutions), scrolling is faster/smoother and the OS in general just feels a lot snappier.  Scrolling performance throughout the OS has improved tremendously; it's not smooth enough to the point where I feel like I can enable the smooth scrolling option and get the same feel as I could on a PC, but performance is still definitely improved.  My only complaint with UI performance continues to be the menu highlighting issue from earlier.  It's not a show stopper, but it's definitely something noticeable.

Exposé performs basically identical to Panther under the new OS, regardless of what system I'm talking about.  The Mac mini continues to have issues at higher resolutions, as Exposé stops being smooth and now even Dashboard is choppy on the mini.  Again, the problem here is a sheer lack of video memory. I do hope that Apple updates the mini to include a better GPU as well as one with a larger local memory very soon, now that Tiger is out.  So much of the beauty of the Dashboard is that you can access it so quickly and seamlessly, that when you get to use a choppy version of the feature, it does slightly ruin the effect of it. 

Although Apple promises better battery life management on notebooks with Tiger, I didn't notice any major improvements during my multiple months with Tiger loaded on the PowerBook.  Obviously, battery life improved over time, but I can't help but feel that even with the final version of Tiger, battery life is no better, and maybe even slightly worse (especially in sleep states) than Panther.  I don't have any quantitative backing for these claims yet - it's just a feeling at this point. 

The main thing to keep in mind is that all four of the systems I tried under Tiger performed, overall and at worst, no differently than under Panther.  In many cases, there were some pretty hefty speedups that were definitely noticeable.  I'd say the biggest performance gains that I noticed were on the G5 machines, despite spending more time with Tiger on the G4 based clients.  If you have a G5 with enough video memory, Tiger and all of its new features should be smooth sailing for you.

I did perform some basic tests to see how Tiger stacked up to Panther in various performance categories.  For these tests, I used a Powermac G5 dual 2.0GHz using a 250GB Maxtor MaXLine III SATA drive (each OS had their own drive with their own clean install of the OS). 

Both Tiger and Panther took basically the same amount of time to start up, with Panther getting from pressing the power button to the desktop in about a second quicker than Tiger. 

	Panther	Tiger
System Startup in Seconds (Lower is Better)	49.1	50.1

The Let1KWindowsBloom test times how long it takes to open 1000 windows:

	Panther	Tiger
Window Creation Time in Seconds (Lower is Better)	44	8

It's not the best test in the world, but it is interesting that there is an order of magnitude of performance improvement of Tiger over Panther.  I'm not totally convinced that this isn't a bug with the test yet, however, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it just yet.

I wanted to see if Tiger improved the absolutely dismal Doom 3 performance of OS X:

	Panther	Tiger
Doom 3 Frame Rate (Higher is Better)	35.9	39.5

And although a 10% performance increase is nothing to scoff at, there's no getting around the fact that Doom 3 performance on the Mac is absolutely unacceptable.  The average frame rates that I'm reporting here don't even begin to tell the full story. There's just far too much stuttering during the actual game for it to even be remotely playable.  It looks like Tiger does improve gaming performance though.

For my final test, I ran a quick decompress test of a 140MB archive to see if I/O performance really improved in Tiger.

	Panther	Tiger
Archive Extraction in Seconds (Lower is Better)	22.93	21.5

Tiger boasted a 6% lower time, but what's interesting is that Tiger's time was much more reliable than Panther's.  There were many occasions when Panther actually took significantly longer than Tiger, but the reverse was never true. 

Benchmarking under OS X continues to be a pain, but there's an early try at quantifying the performance differences between Tiger and Panther.  I can say, in confidence, that if you're a G5 user, you won't be disappointed.  For G4 users, I can't say that the performance improvement was as drastic, but it definitely wasn't negative.