Apple’s latest and greatest operating system Mac OS X Snow Leopard hit the shelves this morning and the optimization on the back end is absolutely incredible.
Now that the official version is in our hot little hands, we’ll be hard at work here at the OWC labs testing and benchmarking all the compatible machines. As each set of results is finalized, I’ll be posting the findings here first. So make sure you keep an eye on our blog for the very latest information.
As reported by OWC Chris S. on Wednesday, Adobe did drop their support of Adobe Creative Suite CS3 for Snow Leopard. Photoshop CS3 was a standard in our memory benchmarking suite for the past several years.
One of the tests we’ve run is the OWC Super-Photoshop Test, which was created as an extended test to our 21 Step Photoshop Action Test. The OWC Super-Photoshop Test measures the time (in seconds) it takes to execute a custom action script comprising of 47 commonly-used, memory-intensive processes on a 21 megapixel image using Adobe Photoshop. It is designed to represent an average photo editing session of a graphic artist. No other processes are running in the background besides those that keep the machine itself running. This is pure, linear computing where every available resource is on hand for the one test running.
In transitioning this test from CS3 to CS4 we decided to take one machine and run the same test between CS3 and CS4 on 10.5 Leopard, then test CS4 on Snow Leopard, just to make sure we were comparing Apples to Apples.
We've found gains in speed of over 20% already.
As you can see, with the standard 4GB of memory installed, updating the software on 10.5 optimized the test by 28 seconds! That’s over a 10% gain in speed just from Adobe themselves. Not too shabby.
When running the same test after upgrading the machine to Snow Leopard though, the speed kicks up even further and drops another 51 seconds from the runtime. Simply put, Apple’s optimization with the release of Snow Leopard sped this one process up by over 20%
More tidbits and a lot more data from our findings will be coming out just as quickly as we can get the numbers together. Stay tuned as it looks like this kitty has claws!
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