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XP's graphics thrashes Apple's OS X
Benchmarks throw new light on Mac inferiority.
By Matthew Broersma, Techworld | Techworld
Published: 14:12 GMT, 27 May 08
A benchmark test designed to compare graphics rendering systems in different operating systems has found that Mac OS X performs, on average, at about half the speed of Windows XP.
Sean Christmann, a developer at user interface design firm EffectiveUI, said his GUIMark test was developed to give designers and developers an indication of which technologies can draw complex interfaces at a smooth rate of motion.
EffectiveUI worked with eBay on the company's eBay Desktop application, on which Christmann was a lead developer.
The test was inspired by the Bubblemark animation test, according to Christmann, but was designed to heavily saturate the rendering pipeline and determine the level of visual complexity achievable in a given two-dimensional rendering technology.
Christmann ran the tests on a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.33 GHz, and with Windows running in a Boot Camp partition.
"I’ve been surprised with the results so far between WinXP and OS X," Christmann said in a blog post. "On the same machine its very clear which vendors take more advantage of the underlying hardware."
For the HTML test, Christmann used the fastest browser on each platform, Safari 3 on Mac OS X and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows. To make the tests as equivalent as possible, anti-aliasing was enabled in Windows at the OS level, Christmann said.
The Windows browser rendered HTML at an average frame rate of 28.36 frames per second (fps), compared to 18.20 fps for Safari 3, Christmann said.
In other tests the disparity was similar or more extreme. Flash, running in Flex 3 in both operating systems, ran at 46.08 fps on Windows and 8.01 fps on the Mac.
Christmann said the poor performance for plug-ins was to be expected. "The results for the different plugin technologies aren’t too surprising since it’s regularly admitted that most companies spend their optimisation time on Windows due to its larger install base," he wrote.
In the case of Flash, however, the results were poorer than expected on the Mac, he said.
"I’m also extremely surprised at the rendering speed that Flash is able to pull off on Windows," he wrote. "I’m considering making the testcase more intensive since Flash is running so fast, but for now maybe the really poor Mac performance will give Adobe something to work on."
While plug-in performance might be related to market share, this factor doesn't account for the sluggish browser rendering times in Mac OS X.
The market share argument "doesn't hold any water though when comparing HTML rendering on Safari/Mac against IE /Windows, where there’s roughly a 1.6 : 1 advantage to the IE team", Christmann wrote. "I can’t help but wonder if the core APIs on the Mac platform are creating any unnecessary roadblocks."
Mac OS X is relatively new to the Intel x86 hardware platform, having run on IBM's PowerPC architecture until 2006. Windows, by contrast, has run on Intel-compatible hardware since its inception.
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Add your commentComments
Taras | Published: 00:42 GMT, 28 May 2008
Why wasn't this test run with Vista. The technology in Vista is more comparable to the technology in Mac OS X 10.5 in terms of complexity of the compositing engines. Come to think of it, it isn't even mentioned which version of OS X was used in the study. Or which version of XP.
Alexander Leonidis | Published: 22:39 GMT, 27 May 2008
This is one test, other tests find Safari to be faster than IE. Who do you believe? As for flash, Adobe should hang their heads in shame for their shameful performance on Mac.
JS | Published: 21:48 GMT, 27 May 2008
Not in the real world. I use IE & XP at work. They both are slow & get slower as the day goes on. Flash is Adobe's problem & is still probably a carbon app.
Steve | Published: 21:25 GMT, 27 May 2008
This article is kind of funny. The author has no idea what he/she is comparing. On the Mac side, the older OS 9 (Quickdraw) is faster at common tasks than the newer OS X (Quartz) compositing engine. Of course, like XP (GDI), OS 9 is far less capable than OS X's rendering abilities. For that matter, why didn't the author compare the speed to Vista (Aero)? Oh, that's right, Vista's rendering is more capable than XP's and likewise, Vista is slower as well. Huh, go figure... ;-)
Ron | Published: 21:10 GMT, 27 May 2008
There's a difference between testing the speed of Rich Internet Applications (which this benchmark supposedly checks) and comparing Win vs Mac graphics. Please don't report on a topic until you understand it, for God's sake. All you've done is contribute to the general ignorance of the WWW. And in general use, my 1st gen MacBook Pro beats the hell out of my new Toshiba laptop (bought for games). The graphics I get in Vista are absolutely painful to watch draw, redraw, stall, and redraw again.
dig | Published: 20:28 GMT, 27 May 2008
guess i should upgrade to xp, thanks for the useful info. oh, and flash bites.
BH | Published: 20:27 GMT, 27 May 2008
My understanding is that Windows has integrated it's graphics drawing into the kernel, which is great until the kernel is swamped with tasks, at which point the graphics are redrawn sporadically or not at all. On OS X, the graphics are just another app, which always gets its share of processor time, so one rogue process doesn't make the screen stop responding. Give me OS X's approach any day.
TWR | Published: 19:24 GMT, 27 May 2008
The developer of this demo should google "beam sync" and make sure that his app is disabling it. Otherwise, the numbers obtained for Mac OS X may be quite a bit slower than expected.
Andy | Published: 19:09 GMT, 27 May 2008
Flash is well known to perform poorly on the Mac compared to Windows (Flex ~ Flash). This is undoubtedly due to Adobe focussing it's optimisation efforts on the largest market - Windows. Also, for general graphics performance, you can't really compare XP with OS X: the latter has a far, far more sophisticated compositing engine, and doing more simply takes more time. I bet that if you compared an operating system from 10 years ago to a current OS you'd find that older OS was actually faster a
BP | Published: 18:48 GMT, 27 May 2008
Also, I'd like to point out that 18 is hardly 'about half' of 28--that is stretching quite a lot. Thirteen could be said to be 'about one-half' of 28. Eighteen is much closer to two-thirds.