Mac OS X 10.6 Brings Serious Performance Gains

Next up we tested Tachyon, a parallel ray-tracing engine, under the Snow Leopard release. This was yet another win for Snow Leopard. The percentage difference here? Nearly 33% in favor of Mac OS X 10.6.

Along side Tachyon, we benchmarked C-Ray, another multi-threaded ray-tracing engine. With C-Ray, the results excited us even more. This was another test profile where it was nearly 50% faster with Mac OS X 10.6.

Lastly, we have results from Sunflow, which is a Global Illumination and Image Synthesis engine using ray-tracing and is written in Java. While the other C-based ray-tracing tests had experienced phenomenal gains with Snow Leopard, there really is not too much to note with the Sunflow numbers. The performance was stable.