Mac OS X 10.6.8 benchmark reveals graphic speed improvement

Sure, the (hopefully) last version of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released yesterday. Yes, it addressed a laundry list of improvements to both networking and Mac OS X Lion readiness. But did you know that installing Mac OS X 10.6.8 might also improve graphic performance on your Mac?

Bill Fox over at MacsOnly.com ran benchmarks on both a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. What he found was that the "newer graphics drivers in 10.6.8 not only eliminated any decline in speed from 10.6.5 through 10.6.7 but showed significantly improved OpenGL performance in Xbench and the game Halo for the ATI Radeon HD 5870 card" in the Mac Pro. His benchmarks also showed improved performance, although not as dramatic, with the Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics processor in the MacBook Pro.

We'd love to hear from any iMac, MacBook, MacBook Air or Mac mini owners who are able to run the same benchmarks on their favorite computers before and after 10.6.8. Leave your results in the comments for other TUAW readers to see.

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Source: http://www.macsonly.com/062411.html

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Mac OS X

Did you know that installing Mac OS X 10.6.8 might also improve graphic performance on your Mac?

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huangers

The 10.6.8 update rocks. I have a macbook air early 2011 with max specs and playing dragon age origins (a 2 yr old game) on it at minimum settings was utterly horrible. Now, I have all graphics settings in-game set on high except for anti-aliasing and it's smoother than even playing on a console. Now, I'm afraid to update to Lion and not be able to finish DA:O.

July 26 2011 at 5:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nicholas W

Hey guys, I did the test too on my MacBook Pro (4.1) and went from 130 to 145 in the OpenGL test. Crazy!

June 25 2011 at 8:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

MrShep

Tried the Xbench openGL test on my March 2008 MBP immediately before and after updating - registering a 25% increase in framerate. Nice! :)

June 25 2011 at 5:26 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

BenM

My mid-2009 MBP got a 1% increase on Quartz and a 17% increase on opengl.

June 24 2011 at 6:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

drycen

@ pakitt

"Still no Trim command support in 10.6.8 for non-Apple SSD drives...."

There is an app foor this: http://www.groths.org/?p=308
Yes, it will enable TRIM on 10.6.x on Non-Apple-SSD

June 24 2011 at 5:19 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply

Oscar Tijerina

If only they could fix the screen flickering issues on the Thunderbolt port.

June 24 2011 at 4:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Akira Sezou

I noticed this too. My laptop is the min for lion, and hopefully that will bring even more improvements. before .8 my laptop would get super hot and levitate from the fans; now I can actually put it on my legs and not worry about hurting the g... well you get the idea

June 24 2011 at 4:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mt3580

Yuusharo, the 10.6.8 fixes the graphic issue on the macbook air.

June 24 2011 at 2:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Yuusharo

I just hope it fixes the graphics issues that 10.6.7 brought in the Macbook Air 2010. Installing the combo update for that version, which is automatically done through Software Update if you restore your machine, caused it to severely lower the graphics performance. I never actually realized until I attempted to play Portal 2 on it and the framerate was abysmal. The workaround at the time was to restore back to an earlier version found on your USB restore key, then download and install the successive delta updates one at a time.

If 10.6.8 fixes that, that's all I care about.

June 24 2011 at 2:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

iplaywithmyself

Yeah I see some improvements on My Mac mini 2010.
Youtube playback is much more smooth and never skipped frames anymore.

June 24 2011 at 2:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply