Snow Leopard Gives 50% Performance Boost When Running Optimized Software

Snow Leopard can give your Mac a 50% performance improvement when running optimized software, a developer has found.

Running a Mac Pro from 2007, programmer Christophe Ducommun compared Snow Leopard to Leopard while encoding and decoding video with his MovieGate software.

Ducommun is optimizing MovieGate to take advantage of two important new technologies in Snow Leopard: Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. While OpenCL allows powerful graphics processors to perform work for applications, Grand Central Dispatch takes advantage of multiple cores, distributing work among all the available cores.

Together, they apps a pretty big speed bump, according to MacBidouille, which published Ducommun’s results:

Snow Leopard
150 frame/s for encoding in MPEG-2
70% CPU load for decoding
130% CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding (ffmpeg)

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Leopard
104 frame/s for encoding in MPEG-2
165% CPU load for decoding
100% CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding (ffmpeg)

Overall, the optimizations give an overall performance increase of about 50%. Ducommun’s Mac Pro is a 2.66 GHz Quad Core machine with a GeForce 8800 GT video card.

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