Is Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Faster on a G4?

I’m running Leopard on a dual 867 mhz G4 Power Mac with 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 pro 128MB video card. I actually got a performance boost on my upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. It stumps me that you say you didn’t because almost everyone back in 2005 was really happy with the boost they got. Anyway, Leopard for me is at least as fast as Tiger was and in several ways it’s faster. You need to make certain you have enough RAM, I would suggest maxing out your powerbook for the best performance. I seriously do not see how anyone with at least the minimum processor requirements could go wrong with Leopard!! Just max out your RAM and enjoy. It’s going to improve in performance even more as the point updates start flowing.

I too am interested in whether 10.5 will perform well on a G4 PowerBook. I have the 1.67 Hi-Res model. From what I have seen in posts so far, I’ve not heard anyone say it runs slower on a G4 1.67 PowerBook, but a few have said they think it runs faster (all-be-it only a little). We know Apple optimized for Intel, maybe they made a final pass at better optimization for new PowerPC hardware as well?

I personally think that it is more a marketing thing, to try and get people with very old Macs (like myself) to get a new one. Tiger was VERY slow for me on it, so I would suspect that buying Leopard would be a good idea (although it is only a 733, and not supported, editing a file will make it work) if it is any snappier. Although I don’t use the thing anymore, it would be nice to have. It looks quite nice.

Not running Leopard but my older iMac has been upgraded from 10.1 to 10.4 and ever version is faster & more stable but I’m sure PC users think we’ve spotted the Yeti getting off a UFO …

Yes, I’ve put OS X 10.5 on an old iBook G4: 768MB memory and 1 Ghz processor. The animation and graphics are a bit slower, but the code underneath seems faster than Tiger.

Chris have you tried Xbench? I often run Xbench before and after a major hardware or software upgrade to see if the numbers change. It may not cover everything but it might give you an idea of what’s going on. You can also post your results and compare them with your previous results or with others who have posted theirs.

http://www.xbench.com/
http://db.xbench.com/

I took Lantz’s advice and ran an Xbench test on my computer and then compared it to some other computers on the database here is the outcome
http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=250510&doc2=201939
hope you guys can see it. of course the 2 computers are not exactly the same i should have done a before and after test on my own computer but i didn’t think of it before upgrading. If anyone is planning on upgrading an older computer maybe try a before and after xbench test. By the looks of the stats that i got it seems that i got some improvements and some slowdowns what does everyone think?

sorry my bad the first test is comparing a 15″ with a 17″ which is not quite right so here is a comparison i found between mine (GP’s) and another similar spec 17″
http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc2=145951

Looking forward to trying Leopard on my five-year-old PowerBook.

Im using a Dual G4 1Ghz MDD (Ati 9800 pro) with upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5… I think the addition of core image and being hardware accelerated gives me a visual performance boost. There is a lot of eye candy in leopard that can distract someone. That distraction causes you to think things are happening smoother and faster. Thats something to consider.
The Powerbook 1Ghz DVI I have upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 is a bit slower. But once again since there is core image support. It makes things a bit more smoother and give more eye candy. But overall the only thing I do notice is that if I open a program in Leopard once then it opens up a lot faster if I close it and decide to open in again in a little while. I should however note that I believe 10.3 performed really well on the Powerbook.

I’ve got 10.4 and 10.5 running on both my G4 1.33Ghz 12″ powerbook and my 2.33GHz 24″ iMac. In a cosmetic way both machines are more responsive under 10.4 but I can only put 1.25GB of RAM in the powerbook and Leopard wants more I think. I’ve just stuck 2.5GB in the iMac and things do appear smoother especially spaces and the cover flow stuff in the finder. But whenever I boot into Tiger I’m amazed at how fast it boots and is ready for action. Geekbench2 reported a slight increase in performance on 10.4. I don’t know if it makes much difference but on both machines I have 10.4 installed on the first partition on the drive which is the fastest area apparently. If you are running lots of apps under leopard I suggest you install as much RAM as you can afford.

I have both 10.4 and 10.5 running on side-by-side dual G4’s. Tiger on the 2 x 1.25ghz G4 is definitely faster than Leopard on the 2 x 1.42, moreover, Leopard is slower than the reliable 10.3.9 I just replaced.

BTW, the dual 1.25 is an aftermarket dual chip from OWC that replaced an older single 733mhz…..it was also faster than the 1.42 when both ran 10.3.9. So I can recommend the OWC chip upgrades.

I installed Leopard on my G4 Mac mini/512MB as an upgrade to Tiger. It pretty much ground my machine to a halt and made it almost unusably slow. I was great on 10.4, but 10.5 has major perf issues across the board for me. Eventually I was able to find a 72-pin 1GB stick to replace the 512 with, and I can tell you it is a night and day difference. My (external) iSight video was so choppy it was completely useless initially after my upgrade to 10.5, but after adding the extra RAM I’m back to a point where I can use it again (although it is still much slower than it was with Tiger). The other big area where I’ve had perf issues is log-in. I used to be able to log in almost instantly in Tiger. Now in Leopard, it takes a good 30s-1m before I can click on anything.

Given that this machine has a pretty weak on-board video setup, it doesn’t really benefit from any of the new graphics, or the perf boosts afforded by offloading processing to the GPU.

In the end of the day, I think I’d offer the same advice as I would to someone thinking about upgrading to Vista. If you have a relatively new computer with a modern cpu & graphics setup, and a goodly amount of ram, you’ll probably be okay. If you’ve got an older machine, you might not be as lucky.

My greatest success with installing OSX Leopard on my Dual 1 Ghz Mirror Desktop was discovering issues of mismatched memory. All my modules are now PC2600U-25330 at 512 each. I have had fewer system hangups since doing this.

The worst scenario even with new memory pairing is occasional hard restarts after an application like iTunes or MSWORD freezes my system.