> On my Beige G3 500 (w/Rage128) the User Interface was *75% faster* asregistered by XBench by going from 10.2.x to 10.3. The % improvement may be smaller on the PowerSurge models due to bandwidth restrictions but there should still be a noticeable improvement.
What I'm more interested in is where and how much it feels faster. When I compare the benchmarks and specs on my Crescendo G3/400 and beige G3/266 I can work back from the performance differences and figure out where they could be coming from... but I've not always been right in my guesses. Going the other way, from "75% better Xbench" or even more detailed stats... I really have no faith in my abaility to figure what that would mean.
Watch XBench while it's running - it only takes 5 min. or so. XBench's UI tests text scrolling speed and the speed of widget display (checkboxes, etc.). Just looking at it visually as the test is going on, it is plenty obvious that in 10.3 things are moving much faster than in 10.2. Same version of XBench.
The big things that I focus on is how fast the windows open up and how fast text (and to a lesser extent, graphics) scroll. The speedup in 10.3 is very noticeable- a number that floats around the net is that, generally, for a speed difference to be barely noticeable, there needs to be at least a 25% difference in speed. OS 10.3's UI speedup is more than just barely noticeable in my machines.
The whole UI is smoother in a Beige G3/500 and a Sawtooth G4/450DP. The G4/450 feels like OS 9 (ie: no lag at all) except for some slow menu pull-downs (most noticeable in Safari). The G3/500 in 10.3 feels like the G4/450DP did before in 10.2- fast but not quite as effortless as in OS 9. A big speed accomplishment seeing as the Beige's memory and lack of AGP are (supposedly) big slowdowns. Put another way, the lack of graphics effiency in OS 10.2 (relative to 10.3) roughly equates the bandwidth difference between a Beige G3 and a Sawtooth G4 DP.
I suspect that the even smaller bandwidth available to the PowerSurge machines will realize smaller performance improvements in 10.3 than the Beiges but I have so far been unsuccessful getting 10.3 on a PowerSurge machine (and I have a lot of PS carcasses here in the office to try yet :). This is based on my observations that much of OS X's UI is very bandwidth dependent. With smaller L2 caches and slower bus speeds or RAM, the UI takes the biggest performance penalty in XBench. This is reflected in the feel of the UI when using these machines- they seem to get the job done in a similar time but the interface is more annoyingly slow to use. Admittedly, this is on slow machines (PM7500 G3 275 and similar slow speeds) and I haven't devised application tests to quantify this effect outside of XBench.
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