How Fast is Jaguar versus 10.1.5 on Your Mac?


An IGM reader has alerted us to a few tidbits concerning the shipping version of Jaguar, versus the one you might find pre-installed on your new Mac.

One major issue remains: at MacOSXRumors recently, I was reading a review of Jaguar's performance on a low-end (233MHz) Wallstreet PowerBook, and was pleased to hear it performed well and was pretty snappy, despite the lousy Rage Pro video card.

But our IGM reader suggests otherwise: Jaguar may seem slow on less-than-optimum hardware; in fact, allegedly it may be slow on anything less than a dual-processor Mac. Other experiences contradict this statement. Feel free to post your 10.2 experiences below.

And one more thing of interest: "FontReserve 3.1 will be
supporting 10.2 and should be available around the 26th."

Thanks for the heads-up.

Analysis: I'm curious about Jaguar's performance on low-end G3s as well. Even the current iBooks fall into this category. Is X.2 really code-optimized for speed, or will it prove a resource hog? I'm skeptical right now; 9.0, 9.1 - all were slower on older hardware than 8.6. As was 7.5 v. 7.1. The exception was 9.2.1 which saw very real speed gains. I also found 10.1.5 unacceptable for general use in my tests on a Wallstreet 233, although I find it quite usable on a Lombard 400/333. Either way, I won't be an early adopter until I see how X.2 performs on some common-and-garden G3s.