The new Mac Pro is looking like it will be an absolute powerhouse, but even regulars Macs should see a major performance improvement running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, thanks to the new operating system’s incorporation of OpenGL 4.
Over on his personal site, Rishi Kumar ran a comparison of OpenGL performance between OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4 and OS X Maverick’s Developer Preview 1. The comparison was done on a behemoth of a Hackintosh, featuring a Intel Core i7-3770k LGA 1155 processor overclocked to 4.4GHz and an overclocked Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660Ti w/ 2GB GDDR5.
Not only is OS X Mavericks much more compatible with the OpenGL standard than Mountain Lion (Mountain Lion didn’t even fully support OpenGL 3.3, while Mavericks supports up to OpenGL 4.1), but even running backwards compatibility comparisons in OpenGL 1.1 – 2.1, Mavericks showed performance gains from anywhere between 39 and 89%!
As Kumar admits, such a comparison is crude, but it still means that we should see quite a performance improvement in Mavericks for 3D graphics that render using OpenGL. Nice.
Source: RK.MD
