Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTPerformance: Similar to Snow Leopard
Benchmarking Macs is a lot like benchmarking smartphones: there's a huge user experience component and not enough tools to really do a thorough job of evaluating performance. The majority of our OS X benchmarks involve patience and a stop watch and we've redone the whole suite in anticipation of Lion.
Generally speaking, performance under Lion hasn't changed all that much since Snow Leopard. Earlier beta releases of the OS were significantly slower than Snow Leopard, but the final code appears to perform on par with SL regardless of microprocessor architecture.
We tested Lion on two platforms. A brand new Core i7 15-inch MacBook Pro and a much older Penryn Core 2 Duo 15-inch MacBook Pro. We measured performance across a number of applications as well as battery life.
The graph below shows the 2011 MacBook Pro and how its performance fares under both OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0. As you can see for the most part performance really remains unchanged:
There were a couple of tests that showed more than a 10% increase in performance (possibly a reflection of Lion's upgrade to OpenGL 3.2 from 10.6's not-quite-3.0) but generally Lion performs no differently than Snow Leopard regardless of the nature of the benchmark. GPU performance also remained mostly unchanged as you can see by the Portal 2 numbers, although the Cinebench 11.5 OpenGL test did go up a bit.
The situation isn't really any different on the older Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro either:
Boot time skyrocketed for some reason (perhaps an artifact of the Lion upgrade on a system with a standard HDD instead of an SSD) but otherwise performance remained mostly unchanged.
Only our iPhoto test showed a greater than 10% increase in performance. Everything else either dropped slightly, stayed the same or showed a small increase in performance.
The seat of the pants feel while using Lion echoes our performance results. While some UI animations seem sped up, most tasks don't feel any quicker under OS X 10.7. Some of the new features under Lion do feel like they require a good amount of processing power. Take the new threaded view in Mail for example. My personal machine is a 2011 MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz Core i7 and an SSD. Once you get over a dozen replies in a thread just loading the thread easily eats up 50% of one of my Core i7 cores.
What about longer threads? Take a look at what happened when I viewed an email thread with 65 replies in my Inbox:
Three cores at 100% just to load the thread. Note that the loading process took a few seconds, dropping down to only 100% CPU utilization before finally completing the load.
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steven75 - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
"The fact is Windows/Office is really only expensive if you are building your own computers and installing your own OS"You seem to be implying that Office comes free with a pre-built computer when it in fact doesn't ever.
anactoraaron - Sunday, July 24, 2011 - link
wrong. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but when office 2010 came out my local office depot (and likely every office depot) had at least one pc with the full version of office 2010 on it. It was some kind of promotion they ran for about 2 weeks.tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apart from the new animations in Safari, is performance improved any? Any word of it getting GPU acceleration?name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
My experience was that it ran the IE Paintball demo 25% faster, and the end result showed no visual artifacts. So, an improvement on 5.0, but still nothing like the HW acceleration performance of IE.On the other hand, I've yet to encounter a site (apart from the IE demos) where this actually matters...
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Oh, it also, if you care, has elementary support for MathML. To be honest, however, the support is REALLY limited. The typography looks like crap, and anything even slightly fancy looks even worse --- eg long bars over symbols, large surds, etc.tipoo - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Thanks. Yeah, its GPU acceleration doesn't seem as expansive still as other browsers, judging by canned benchmarks I've run it through. IE9 and FF5 are still far ahead in GPU acceleration, Chrome and Opera are getting there, Safari 5.1 is still last.EnzoFX - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I think it's pretty unfair to compare Windows full-screening to Lion's. Full screening in Windows is not a feature at all IMO, it is the equivalent of dragging the window size out to the size of the screen. You do not gain any functionality whatsoever (usually just a lot of empty space, which was never in Apple's radar before). This kind of full-screen functionality has been present in OS X long before Lion, though it was often more manual, having to drag the window size out.But as you say, Apple has added functionality and it's become it's own separate feature. I think the comparison is pointless.
SmCaudata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
True full-screen in Windows only happens with games, certain video players, and select other apps. I personally so no use for full-screen for most computer applications.Also, the comparison is valid because even in those areas where Windows does use full-screen, the other display still works. I can have a full-screen movie on one monitor while I do whatever I want on the other.
I really fail to see how Apple's implementation has "added functionality" that didn't exist in other OSes before. The article talks about using gestures instead of minimization... isn't that what Alt+Tab and Win+tab already did?
There are certain things that Apple does do well. Their dock was something that MS obviously took inspiration from for W7. This implementation of full-screen seemed pretty limited IMO.
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
I suspect that the multi-screen hiccups with full-screen are purely temporary.We have seen problems like this before --- for example when multi-user GUI support (the rotating cube thing, to allow new users to log in to a mac) was first added, it didn't take long to discover that various iLife apps didn't behave properly. (I forget the details, but I think both iTunes and iPhoto wouldn't launch for the new user.)
It's one of the drawbacks of Apple being so secretive, even internally, that you get these sorts of crossed signals. But the issues usually get fixed, and if they are very visible, they usually get fixed soon.
I'd say, right now, the appropriate response is to assume this is a screwup, not go into conspiracy theory mode about how this is a plot by Apple to eventually remove multi-screen support.
Uritziel - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
LOL. As if a company spearheading Thunderbolt would aim to remove multi-screen support.