The test machines all showed massive improvement in opening these large, detailed (read: hard to compress) cityscapes of Tokyo, which were blown up to 35MB at 20,000 pixels wide. We also noticed how the snow leopard machines opened the files in parallel, while Leopard opens them sequentially.
Here's a test we used during Windows 7 reviews, basically a photoshop script and JPG we run through and time. Snow Leopard showed no differences in performance over Leopard, using matching hardware (All differences are generally within a 1% delta). It is worth noting that although Adobe has released a statement saying CS4 is compatible with Snow Leopard, there obviously hasn't been any optimization yet. Expect a future version to be blazing fast if it works with Snow Leopard's underlying multicore and GPU technology, but for now, at least its not slower. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based
Quicktime tests show the amount of CPU being used while playing back the bad ass trailer from James Cameron's Avatar at 1080p. that Quicktime 10, on Snow Leopard, is easily more efficient than old versions of Quicktime. Even on non supported H.264 hardware, like the Macbook Pro's 15-inch 8600GT card, it just works better in QT10. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based
Geekbench is a synthetic benchmark testing cpu and memory performance. Snow Leopard, Apple claims, runs math much faster and geek bench tells that same story here when we use the 32 and 64-bit versions under Snow. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based
Xbench is an older piece of software that tests an entire system, from cpu to disks to graphics. Oddly, Open GL performance on the 13inch Macbook was half that of what we saw in Leopard, which caused the score to drop a bit in Snow Leopard. Math processing was faster, however. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based
Installation times were about 30% less in Snow, but the size of the install also dropped from 16GB to 10GB, so that makes a lot of sense to me. Common sense.
Zipping the same file up we used in our Quicktime tests showed Snow Leopard as faster, perhaps due to the improved math processing performance.
Using Google's v8 suite for javascript speed testing, Snow Leopard was faster using Safari 4 than Leopard. Firefox, for the record, isn't even close. Chrome might be, though.
Initial Time Machine Backups to a USB Drive were faster under Snow, too. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based
Yes, it's smaller, which I believe is a first for an OS upgrade. How? They lost about 6GB (Apple claims 7GB) by ditching printer drivers and installing them on demand over the internet and all the binaries are now intel-only, ditching the Power PC support for good. Power PC apps still can run, though, by downloading or installing Rosetta virtual support for PowerPC apps from the install disc.
Notice there's no difference in these results between Snow and old Leopard. The reason? Handbrake hasn't been optimized for Snow yet.