How deep are Leopard's changes?
by Elsa Wenzel
October 29, 2007 4:18 PM PDT

Our review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last Thursday lauded its lovely interface innovations but withheld judgment about the operating system's speed until we could put it through its paces. Tests returned from CNET Labs on Saturday show that Leopard didn't perform noticeably faster than Mac OS 10.4.6 Tiger.

Because Leopard's improved speeds of between 1 percent and 3 percent fall within the 5 percent margin of error, it's fair to call Leopard and Tiger even. Lab tests explored Leopard's boot time, multimedia multitasking, and handling of the Quake 3 game. Similarly, the 2005 release of Tiger did not demonstrate vast speed improvements over Panther, a previous version of Mac OS X.

Still, some users commenting on Leopard-related message boards and stories at CNET and elsewhere swore that they detected faster performance with Leopard. Unfortunately, CNET Labs could not vouch for the performance of Adobe Systems' Photoshop CS3, which, for reasons not yet understood, wouldn't run on Leopard in our usual battery of automated tests.

Don't jump to conclusions, however; the photo-editing application seemed to behave under normal conditions, and Adobe insists that Photoshop can run in Leopard. However, full Leopard support for all versions of Adobe Creative Suite 3 won't become available until Adobe releases updates in three to four months.

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