Quick facts:
Tiger is the fastest OS X. Even compared to previous OS X versions.
Mac OS 9.2.2 is the fastest Mac OS (among versions with Appearance Manager present).
Mac OS is faster than OS X.
TL;DR Mac OS 9.2.2 is MUCH faster than Tiger, which is faster than Leopard ("Sorbet" or otherwise) and later
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Regarding Tiger vs. Leopard and later, Tiger has more features in some regards, the most obvious one being Classic (which is much better in Jaguar, but they all suck compared to running native Mac OS), and being able to use the command line interface without password when there's a password prompt, unlike Leopard, which requires you to uselessly waste time by REQUIRING your current user to have a password, else whatever you were trying to get done SILENTLY fails, which is MASSIVELY unproductive (and will leave you confused as to why it's not working).