Following up here, what
@barracuda156 wrote is probably the best answer for the question you asked,
@ethanhodges .
How one uses their Mac is going to be as unique as the person using it, and this is no exception. In most cases for late PowerPC Macs, you’ll find the best
general performance from OS X 10.5.8, coupled with tweaks mentioned in
The Leopard Thread wiki.
The Clouded Leopard Project — or SL-PPC for shorthand — is and has, from its inception, a test exploration for folks who haven’t been shy about tinkering with functions beneath the bonnet, to see just how far Apple went with PowerPC-aware development during the internal development of Snow Leopard.
What we’ve learnt from this project is Apple set out at its inception to prepare Snow Leopard as a Universal Binary, undoubtedly as an end of the road for PowerPC Macs, but one which would have provided company support for a bit longer than halting at Leopard. As new technologies were brought into the fold, particularly around GPU support architectures, Apple drew a line in the sand and changed course, realizing that continued PowerPC support (specifically, support for the AGP bus) would not be supported by the two major GPU vendors. This coincided with the GPU industry, working with Apple and other major tech companies, adopting a new language modality for new and future GPUs which would not work for
most of the GPUs developed for AGP and earlier video buses. At present, we know PCIe-based video cards from NVIDIA, such as in the A1117 Power Mac G5s, are fully supported under this new paradigm/modality.
So in short, SL-PPC
does work, quite well, all the above considered, and the community work from this project here has found multiple ways to backport stability from later releases of OS X — which in many cases means borrowing from updates to
Leopard which came out
after the SL-PPC builds (10A96 and 10A190) went out for external developer testing (such as 10.5.5, 10.5.6, 10.5.7, and 10.5.8 — with most backported fixes coming from 10.5.8, which was released to the public only a few days before Snow Leopard went on sale).
And yes, I have bench-tested Build 10A96 on my test mule, an A1138 PowerBook G4, and the SL-PPC 10A96 bench scores (984) are
at or above what they were in 10.5.8 — which you’ll note that even my
10.5.8 scores (982) are moderately higher than what
Everymac reports (843). But again, this is just simple, regimented, uncomplicated, standard bench tests. They don’t reflect how the computer is being used for everyday stuff in 2022, with stuff available to us in 2022.
I hope this helps to answer some of your questions. I also encourage you, if you’re really curious about running SL-PPC at home (and personally, I hope you are!), to read this thread’s entire WikiPost. It’s a lot, but it’s also written as concisely as possible and tries to cover all the major bases as well as possible.
