OpenGL Gets Faster With OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Beyond Apple's forthcoming OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" release finally bring OpenGL 4.0 support to Apple hardware, there's also GL performance improvements to make OS X more competitive with other operating systems for gaming.

With getting through the Apple MacBook Air Haswell benchmarks and carrying out other Haswell Linux vs. OS X benchmarks, I've begun playing around with OS X Mavericks and checking out the OpenGL capabilities and performance.

A featured multi-length article is in the works for exploring the OS X 10.9 Mavericks performance for OpenGL graphics and other workloads while embedded below is just a teaser. For these first Mavericks tests, Unvanquished was used with its GL3 renderer.

Embedded below is a portion of the results from an Apple Mac Mini bearing an Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" CPU with HD 3000 graphics. The OS X 10.8.4 performance was compared to OS X 10.9 Mavericks with all available Apple updates as of 15 July. These early test results can be found in 1307158-SO-UNVANQUIS31.

Stay tuned for more OS X 10.9 Mavericks tests that are forthcoming on Phoronix. You can carry out your own Apple OS X performance benchmarks, including against Windows and Linux and BSD, using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite automated benchmarking platform.