Snow to Mountain Lion some performance gains

[jkmags]

I recently updated my Snow Leopard OS to Mountain Lion, I never updated to Lion as I didn't see the need at the time. With the new features (Safari and Airplay mirroring as an example) and the low price of Mountain Lion I thought I would give it a shot.

I won't touch on how i feel about the new features coming from Snow Leopard as we have a lot of threads already covering most topics but before I updated I had installed an OWC 240 SSD with a clean install of Snow with all my normal Applications. I ran a Time Machine backup for a good restore point and Lion update once i had verified all my critical applications were running prior to the update.

One thing i did was run Nova Bench to grab a base as a way to see if Lion was more efficient or maybe had updated drivers for our Macs. Below you can see the results before and after the update. Lion seems to be a little more efficient with Graphics, CPU and drive write speeds, though I don't understand why for the later.

I thought I would pass it along for those who were wondering if they wanted to update to Lion from Snow. Personally I like it and seems pretty smooth sailing so far.


Sorry if this has been discussed prior, maybe we had the same results from Snow to Lion vs Snow to MLion.

 

[MacSquirrel]

Wow! Thats pretty awesome! I wonder if my 2009 27" Quad i5 with ATi HD 4850 512 Vram and 16GB of ram would have similar results. I haven't upgraded from Snow Leopard for that reason.

 

[jkmags]

Wow! Thats pretty awesome! I wonder if my 2009 27" Quad i5 with ATi HD 4850 512 Vram and 16GB of ram would have similar results. I haven't upgraded from Snow Leopard for that reason.

i'm sure some of the score discrepancy comes from "other" factors but both results were right after a reboot and it was the 1st application run. NovaBench is a free app from the AppStore if you wanted to download it. I can say I do like some of the new features of ML, the big one is Safari's improved performance (which you should see too) but I did spend a day going through my applications to make sure they were ML compatible. I have noticed some odd behaviors with Istat Menus3 but other than that it seemed like a good update.

I think ML is suppose to be more memory efficient and I should have run some other before/after tests but I was just curious at the time as a second thought prior to the update.

 

[MacSquirrel]

Ill restart and run it and see what score ill get. I don't have an SSD but the 1TB Seagate drive isn't terrible.

 

[MacSquirrel]

Here it is, Not bad in my opinion but not as good as yours. This is in 10.6.

 

[haravikk]

Am I reading it wrong, or does it look like your integer operations per second are more than a third faster on Mountain Lion? That's a pretty interesting difference, as everything else is a lot closer.

 

[jkmags]

Am I reading it wrong, or does it look like your integer operations per second are more than a third faster on Mountain Lion? That's a pretty interesting difference, as everything else is a lot closer.

Correct, the Drive write speeds and integer operations seemed to be the biggest difference. Something must have changed.

 

[MacSquirrel]

Gotta Back up 450GB then ill do a fresh install on mine. Hope it is a gain and not a loss in performance like yours.